SNIPPET: In the Jan-Feb 1999 issue of "Ireland of the Welcomes" magazine is a several-page article by Alannah HOPKIN w/ colorful photos by Brian LYNCH about the Ceide Fields and visitor centre near Belderrig, on the NW coast of Co. Mayo. Overlooking the Atlantic, the pyramidal building's bold design by the Office of Public Works and Mary McKENNA has won many awards and blends in nicely with the landscape. For many years local people who cut their turf by hand in the traditional way from the prehistoric bog suspected that the stones they found under the bog had been placed there deliberately, seemed to run in lines, as if they had once been walls. Patrick CAULFIELD, who taught at the National School in nearby Belderrig in the 1930s, wrote to the National Museum asking them to investigate, but to no avail. His son. Seamus, who had grown up in the area and trained as an archaeologist, pursued his father's quest and was to become the moving spirit behind the original Ceide Fields excavations. Underneath up to four metres of blanket bog a very different landscape has been preserved. Five and a half thousand years ago this was typical farming countryside, with cattle grazing in stone-walled fields interspersed by homes and kitchen gardens. Over four square miles of farmland, that supported a population of about 600 people, has been trapped in time by the growth of bog. The Ceide Fields is immensely old; it is, quite simply, the most extensive Stone Age monument in the world. No quern stones for grinding wheat and barley have been found, so it is concluded that they ate a kind of porridge. About a quarter of a million tons of stone were used in the walls at the Ceide Fields and speak of a society with a very high level of organisation. They did not build in a haphazard way; the fields follow the contours of the landscape, and the walls run parallel to each other, with cross-divisions creating different sized fields. It can be seen from the stone that these people lived in scattered, unfortified dwellings. Unlike those who dwelt 6,000 years later in the ring forts and crannogs of Early Christian Ireland, these people appear to have had no fear of attack, neither from within the community, nor from outsiders. Good land became wetter and less fertile, so that eventually the population moved away, possibly only five miles to the east, to the drier and more fertile land around Ballycastle. Visitors to the centre will find roaming flocks of sheep, larks singing high in the sky, rather windy conditions -- but on a beautiful sunny Mayo day the sea is a dazzling bright shade of turquoise. The next stop across the ocean is Iceland, and beyond that, the Arctic. Inside the centre one can watch a film on the history of the area, gaze up at a Scots-Pine towering overhead that was found in the nearby bog at Belderrig and radio carbon dated to 2300 BC, and view interesting displays depicting scenes of domestic life in the area's distant past.