>> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following.

♪♪ authentic Ireland travel experiences for over 55 years.

Your Celtic story starts here.

♪♪ ♪♪ away from laughter, music, heritage, and the arts.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Woman singing in Irish ] ♪♪ >> On the west coast of Ireland, reaching out into the North Atlantic is a dramatic and beguiling landscape.

Kerry: the kingdom.

>> I guess the wonder of Kerry is its sheer diversity, really.

There's still living rivers and lakes.

There's all these rocky, high places and boggy places and, you know, wetlands and dry lands, and you've got some of the only ancient woodlands left.

And it's just a beautiful place.

♪♪ >> We are here since the Famine and grew up here, Black Valley.

You would imagine that in isolated places like this, that anybody who lives out here would want to live out here.

It's the nicest place in the world to be, because you're away on your own.

And when all the world kind of is losing its head, you're in a different spot altogether.

So you don't have to go along with it.

You know what I mean?

>> So, having been born and raised in an area like this, I believe Kerry may be one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

I sat on a mountain as a kid, upset that I didn't have tarmac to skateboard on.

After spending times in cities and towns, they can keep their tarmac.

[ Chuckles ] ♪♪ >> The past speaks very loudly to you when you live somewhere like this.

When you look at this place, it reminds you of these huge wheels turning and that nature can do without us.

♪♪ >> This is the story of how people have lived in this landscape, how it has shaped us, and how we have shaped it.

It is a tale of ebb and flow... tension and release... tides of time and culture.

How we have sought to control the land and how she ceaselessly resists to return to her restless nature.

♪♪ >> Back 400 million year ago, it looks like we had an animal called a tetrapod walk across one of these layers and leave its footprint.

I didn't expect how I was going to feel when I saw them, but when you're here with them and you realize what it is you're actually looking at... it's kind of mind-blowing.

These are the oldest of these tracks in situ that we've got on the planet.

People will talk about Kerry, and there will be certain historic turning points in history, and there's nothing.

There's nothing in the country that's as important to our history as, potentially, these tracks are.

So, the tetrapods that walked through the sediment eventually formed this stone shelf.

They were the first marine creatures with a backbone that ventured onto land.

And to do that, they had to develop legs very similar in shape to the ones that you see on this little newt.

Splayed wide, awkward kind of a walk, dragging his belly and tail behind him.

So the tetrapods were basically a meter-to-2-meter-long version of this body type.

And this was a huge leap forward, because every animal with a spine up to then was a fish.

Well, it may be improbable -- it's not impossible that this particular individual is what every land mammal with a spine has evolved from.

So this would be -- I can't even start telling you how many "greats" we'd have to say before you get back to your great-great-grandmother.

But if you go back far enough, it's possible that this individual is related to all of us.

And that's a -- It's a wild thing to take on board.

♪♪ It's stunning to think that you're... you're sitting on ground that possibly one of your, like, oldest ancestors walked on.

When I first saw these tracks, it's exciting.

I get very excited about it, but it...

It's hard to explain this.

It makes me feel meaningless, in a good way.

So, when you're looking at the scale, like, when you're looking at 380 million years and you're seeing that this is part of our own story, how we got to be here, your place in that is such a tiny sliver that nothing you do is that important, you know?

And rather than that be a kind of a despondent thing, it makes me feel -- It makes me walk away much lighter.

I feel that I can only mess up so badly in life, when, really, it's not -- it's going to be a tiny part of this ongoing story.

We don't know what color it was.

It could have been a stunner.

You know, I'd hate to be judged by my footprints.

[ Laughs ] >> The rocks here in Kerry have been folded, crushed, and fractured by immense geological forces for over 400 million years, creating a ragged and complex landscape capable of supporting a rich variety of ecosystems.

♪♪ >> Kerry is steeped in the language of myth and legend, from the archaeology that we see all around us, from the ancient burial mounds, the stone forts, the rock art on the hills, the Bronze Age alignments on the ridgelines, and tucked away in the folds here and there, abandoned villages from the Great Famine.

It's one of the wild places of Ireland.

The archaeology of the valley is giving us a storyline, each phase representing a different people that's lived in and around these mountain valleys.

So, our history has been full of these booms and population collapses, a seesaw of ecology, environment, and climate.

And that's what we're reading in the landscape, as well.

We're looking at past climatic events that have impacted on the ability of people to forge a living in these high valleys.

There are periods when that wave reaches high up into the valley and then suddenly flows back out again as the climate gets wetter and colder.

♪♪ >> At the time they were formed, the mountains in Kerry were absolutely huge.

An awful lot higher than what you're looking at today.

You got 300 million years of erosion happening in these mountains, so this would have started to grind them down.

But a lot of the features that we're looking at in Kerry, the last Ice Age we had, which ended about 12,000 years ago, that would have done a lot of the shaping and sculpting of the landscape there that we see today.

♪♪ These glaciers are moving and they're grinding everything, the forces are that great, you know, and it's changing mountains and valleys.

So you're talking about an area that's scraped clear of vegetation.

It's basically been completely scoured.

♪♪ ♪♪ So, we're here in Carrauntoohil, the highest point in Ireland.

It is hard not to be moved by what you can see here.

Like, I've been up a few hills in Ireland, but you rarely have a vantage point like this.

You can probably see more of the country from here than you can see from any other point.

So it's, yeah, hard not to be at least a bit impressed by it.

♪♪ The glaciers would have changed the shape of the mountains that we see and actually created the valleys that run through them.

The mountainous areas in Kerry were covered in glaciers, but your low-lying areas weren't.

It's quite possible that they ended up as the repositories for some of the plants and wildlife that survived.

So you're thinking about animals like giant deer, red fox, reindeer, wolves, hares, stoats.

And they would basically have used that area as sort of a hangout or a survival patch during the last Ice Age.

♪♪ >> So, when the ice was moving, it would have been transporting boulders, and at the time they were dumped, they would have been bare, But over time, little mosses would have colonized them.

So, what you have here is a rock with a groove in it, and some water has accumulated in the groove.

And in that water or that wet patch is able to grow these mosses.

These are really primitive plants.

They don't have roots, so they're not needing to root in anything.

But they grow on the rock and they die, and their dead bodies help to make some soil.

And then more grow in that little bit of soil and make more soil.

And this is how all of the soil on the Earth has been made.

And so the layers of soil build up until you have enough to support much bigger plants, like shrubs and trees.

And this is the very first step in succession.

The ultimate step in succession, then, is woodland.

♪♪ >> During the last Ice Age, the sheltered valleys of Kerry proved to be a precious seed bank for Ireland's native woodlands.

As temperatures warmed and the ice retreated, virgin rainforest emerged from these refuges and spread across the landscape.

[ Birds chirping ] >> In Kerry, there's three types of woodlands.

There's the oak woodlands.

There's the yew woodlands.

And then there's really interesting Atlantic temperate rainforest.

And that's why it's kind of unique, I guess, because there's loads of different pockets of ecosystem all here, all woven together into this magical web of beauty.

The oaks are the king of the woods in Ireland.

A minimum of 500 creatures are dependent upon the oak's presence for their own survival.

And then a dying oak or a dead oak supports thousands.

They become a massive pantry.

Yew is beautiful, and it's one of the only native evergreens that we have.

And I think it's a really special tree.

♪♪ The mosses and the ferns and all the little lichens -- they aren't indicative of how everything here used to be rainforest.

They're sitting on branches of trees and they're absorbing moisture from the air.

This whole web of life has the most amazing connections and interconnections.

When you find those pockets in Kerry, it's just mind-blowing.

Because the seed banks in these places need to be protected, because those tiny pockets of forests that are left are vitally important.

And you can just imagine how amazing Ireland was when it was covered in her choice of her own clothing, like.

Amazing.

>> Since the end of the last Ice Age, repeated waves of human colonizers swept over Kerry's mountains, lowlands, and coasts, each leaving its own distinctive imprint on the landscape.

The early settlers trod softly, leaving only the faintest hints of their lives.

But successive waves have had an increasingly conspicuous and profound effect on the environment.

One of the most significant impacts came with the discovery that there was something hidden deep in the structure of the rocks that was of great value.

♪♪ >> So, right from the very earliest use of metal in Ireland, about 4,500 years ago, we can see Kerry as being a very important source for copper.

You see, in the rocks here, we have this bright-green stone, which is copper ore in the form of malachite.

So, this is a Bronze Age mine.

It's a place where, in the Bronze Age, they would use stone hammers and they were hacking away at the stone surface here and extracting this green stone, which has a lot of copper in it.

They would have pounded away with stone mauls.

And then you'd put it into a furnace.

Then you would melt it down and you mix the copper with tin, and that gives you an alloy of bronze.

It's quite incredible how they had this sophisticated process figured out 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

If you can imagine, they were like the alchemists of their day, literally turning rock into a fluid.

♪♪ Those with the knowledge of casting might have been seen as being extraordinary people, maybe even like magicians, that made such useful and beautiful objects, like axes, swords, and jewelry.

Key parts of the process would likely have been safeguarded as best they could, and in some instances, they were choosing secretive or secluded locations.

♪♪ All the way through the Bronze Age, we see Irish bronze being manufactured to very high standards.

So by the end of the Bronze Age, we have some of the most exquisite examples of personal displays of wealth that can be found.

>> Bronze brought huge advancements to the people, who could now move away from using Stone Age tools to the use of metal.

It was a huge technological leap and brought about a massive change to society and to the environment.

>> So, 4,000 years ago, this would have been a whole hive of activity.

Built by the first pioneering, metal-using societies, and they were having a massive impact, ecologically.

They're burning forests.

They're mining.

It's an industrial landscape for the first time.

They're living harsh lives in a difficult world.

So I don't think they had any sense of what they were doing.

Like, the last tree that was cut down, they never remembered that there was originally a forest there, because it's a progressive thing over a series of centuries this has happened.

So the people at the start of it and the people at the end of it have no idea what it was like when the first Bronze Age people came here.

>> The magnificent forests cut and burned by settlers descended into the world beneath their feet.

And they exist there still, bound into the fabric of the soil, changing its very nature.

>> The people in charge of metal are the new lords of the country.

And they're saying, "This is our place and that's our mountain.

We're building our ancient tombs here as a sign that we're here, it's our land, and we're building them in honor of our heavenly gods between this world and the next world, on the highest peaks."

Believe it or not, you can see these from miles away, just silhouetted as ancient fingertips and pointers in the landscape.

Pointers to this ancient world.

♪♪ So, there's lots we know about these monuments, but the more we know, almost the more mysterious they become.

>> Around 3,500 years ago, there was a significant climatic change in Kerry.

People experienced a collapse of the ecosystem around them.

Relentless rain turned their fields into floodlands.

Faced with this existential threat, they turned to the most powerful force they knew.

[ Thunder rumbles ] ♪♪ >> By the end of the Bronze Age, we do know that people turned to these liminal places, these watery places, and in some instances at least, they were putting very valuable objects beyond use.

♪♪ It might have been the case, in the face of deterioration of habitats, that they might have tried to engage with spirits or ancestors or the land itself.

And that would have given them a sense of agency and control, perhaps.

♪♪ So, this idea of making offerings at watery places -- it's something that you see all the way through prehistory.

It's in the Bronze Age, it reappears again in the Iron Age, and, you know, even into the early Christian period, where people are visiting wells and making offerings there, you know, praying and asking for help from the supernatural world.

And, I mean, that's a custom that even persists into modern times.

People still feel this need to go to these watery places, these natural places, and to ask for assistance and for help.

>> There's 200 holy wells in County Kerry.

There's 3,000 around the country.

They're found in all sorts of extraordinary locations.

Because it's the oldest living tradition that we have that links us back to our distant ancestors.

It's embedded in the genes of many Irish people.

But there are thousands of people visiting wells, tens of thousands, almost certainly.

They're going to the well because it brings comfort to them.

It's a journey to a remote little corner.

You're walking into the past, you're looking into the future, and you're comforting yourself by going to the well.

But you have all this history embedded in it.

And the water from the well is protecting you in this life, and it's part of your spiritual journey into the next life.

That tradition of holy wells that we have is a continuation of that earlier Bronze Age tradition, almost certainly.

>> As the climate got wetter, the people's lands became so flooded that it led to the development of blanket bog, which spread across valleys and mountains, burying their ancient homes, fields, and world in peat.

>> There's a whole hidden landscape here on these peninsulas.

You look out across the bog, you think it's been there for millennia.

Buried in the peat, there's another landscape that people walked and lived and farmed.

I'm here right next to this extraordinary section of ancient wall.

It's part of a more extensive field system that's very hard to see because it's buried in the peat, but it's exposed here.

But this wall was about 4,000 years old.

It was built when this valley was populated in the Bronze Age with houses, with farmers, and probably with miners coming through.

Bits of it are visible.

And, so, right underneath, there's a layer of charcoal, extensive layer of charcoal.

And this charcoal is the result of burning by the Bronze Age farmers.

So, one of the big impacts of having a layer of charcoal in the soil is charcoal doesn't break down easily, and it clogs the soil pores.

And then the climate begins to get a little bit wetter, and the minerals are leaching from that soil and there's literally a layer of iron forming in the soil.

So now you have a double whammy and you go from a fairly half-decent soil to one that's clogged and soggy.

And then sphagnum moss takes off.

And that's the building block of the bogs.

So the peat keep on growing.

You know, we have peat bogs in Kerry that are 6 and 7 meters deep, so they will literally drown the place.

So what's hard to believe about these ancient walls is that people can't get their head around the fact that peat grows so deep and that you could have a whole ancient landscape 4 meters under your feet, which you have in Kerry in places.

In this section here, it's really nice, because you can just see the depth of peat.

Just goes right down.

Look at the depth of it here.

>> The charcoal layer that was created by the burning of the forests clogged the soil.

They had inadvertently changed the landscape upon which they depended.

We are now beginning to realize that what spread across the landscape, if protected, could hold the secret to our salvation.

>> So, at the end of the Bronze Age, all the evidence says that the climate changed.

It got cooler, it got wetter, so it wasn't so easy for the people to farm.

A changing climate is a really dramatic change for people to cope with.

But for the planet at large, it's something that's been going on since the planet formed.

And nature adapts.

Agriculture ceased for 500, 600, maybe 700 years, and during that time, nature took over again, and this wilderness was born.

And because there were fewer people, the land was left to go a little bit wilder than it had before.

So two things happened.

In some places where there was pretty good drainage, trees came back and we had the birth of all of these new wild woodlands.

And in the wilder, wetter places, you got this huge expansion of these very special blanket bogs.

So a changing climate can be really disastrous for humans.

As a society, we depend on the climate that we know.

But nature is different and nature is constantly adapting.

And when the climate changed towards the end of the Bronze Age, although it was bad news for the people and the population declined, it created this big shift in the landscape and allowed the creation of these amazing blanket bogs and heaths that we're here among now in Kerry.

Of course, after that, the population began to grow, and nature is pushed back and the people dominate again.

So you have this seesaw effect throughout history, over thousands of years, between people and nature.

♪♪ >> Over thousands of years, as the peat has grown in these valleys, farmers have tried to adapt to it by booleying.

♪♪ Booleying is where you're bringing your cattle into the hills from May to September to utilize those higher-upland marginal grazing lands.

So they're seasonal settlements in the hills.

They're the equivalent of what you had in the Alps or in the Pyrenees.

And it's a village that's moving.

It's not just one or two families.

You have a whole village movement up into the hills.

♪♪ [ Bird squawks ] ♪♪ So, you're living in your booley house.

You're minding your cattle.

And the booley is the little corner, a milking place.

And you're making your cows and you're making butter.

And periodically, you're bringing it back down the valley.

♪♪ The cattle will be ranging around and they'll have people minding them.

And of course, they had to have people minding them.

The reason you have to mind your cattle is there's wolves, which we got rid of in the 18th century in the mountains here.

>> The consequences of the removal of wolves from the landscape were profound.

Without wolves, sheep, goat, and deer can move across the entire landscape, grazing day and night, selectively targeting flowering plants and saplings, stripping the land bare, and preventing woodland regeneration.

>> So, marginal land is land that you can kind of use for seasonal grazing, but it's not considered suitable for full-time living.

in the 1700s that, really, these areas became inhabitable.

Because you could now move into an area that was considered marginal land before, you could plant an acre of potatoes, build yourself a small stone house, and you could raise a family.

So most of the people who lived in these areas, although they would have built their own houses, were still paying rent to landlords for the privilege of being there.

And the rent was in the form of crops grown or animals reared.

You might rear a pig, and that pig would literally be the rent that you'd pay.

And often, the potato was left as their principal food source.

Places changed from being relatively little-used or only seasonally used to having families and homesteads and, in some places, entire communities popping up.

And so your population boomed during that time.

They were pushed into dependence on the potato.

And they didn't have access to your other livestock, because this was often being taken as rent.

And that just meant that when the crop failed, you're left with a choice.

Do you eat your rent to stay alive and then face eviction and emigration, or do you starve to death in a house you've paid the rent on?

So for most people, they ate the livestock, they fell behind in the rent, and eventually, they were evicted from their houses, forcefully.

And that led to the deaths and emigration that followed.

You can come across small homesteads like the one that's behind me, with a small-area field here with these potato drills.

And when you see those, you realize that there was an entire community living there at some stage that has now vanished, you know?

It's like a ghostly trace of families and, in some cases, entire communities that were there, that these are almost the only trace left of them.

[ Birds chirping ] When that crop failed, you now had huge populations in these areas that couldn't support them without that.

>> We are here since the Famine and grew up here, Black Valley.

We're all sheep farmers.

People who live here don't want to make a big living, but a reasonable living.

Like, when does a family farm not be a family farm anymore?

And most people would say, when it can't support the family.

And at the moment, none of these farms in these areas would support a family.

We are caught between a rock and a hard place, because in these places, you're not producing a lot.

So are you a farmer or aren't you a farmer?

And then if you're trying to overproduce here, you're fooling yourself, because your costs are too high and you're probably damaging the place, as well.

So I don't know.

There should probably be a better approach on farming marginal ground like this.

It shouldn't probably be in with mainstream farming at all.

But it is up to the system to get it right.

What I would be advocating now is that you do pockets of trees here and there, and what I think is the best is a bit of everything -- a bit of woodland and a bit of scrub and a bit of well-grazed ground.

But it's to get that balance right.

♪♪ >> As far back as I can trace my family roots, we are of the Stack's Mountains in County Kerry.

It's a place where I feel at my truest, anchored.

I suppose, growing up, like, you would have been aware of the context that this was not seen as good land.

It was never going to be the Golden Vale, you know?

This is maybe seen by some as brown or gray or misty, dull land.

You need to be resilient to survive on this landscape.

It's not easy.

And the farmers that have eked out a living on this landscape, like, it's just tremendous, because it's not easy to farm here.

Like, you know, it's not handed to you.

You have to fight for every inch and you have to work with what you have.

It's difficult land to make a living off of.

The landscape has very much shaped people, and I suppose there's a steely determination in the people that come from this area, as well.

Like, you know that they're able to live with the elements and live with the poor agricultural soils, but they're still able to make a living.

I suppose for me, personally, knowing what I know now, I know that there's a whole spectrum of color here, and it's a beautiful landscape and it's really so important.

It's not the monotone of green that's championed by some, but rather a multi-spectrum color of life, and there's so much going on here.

There's so much flowers and butterflies and insects and birds and everything like that.

And it's so important also in terms of carbon, the peat soils that are here, and the semi-natural grasslands that are here.

So today, you know, knowing what I know now, I'm actually quite proud to say that I'm from the Stack's Mountains.

When I think about conservation, I'm always thinking about the future generations and what we're handing on to them and more and more realizing that conservation is an intergenerational game.

It's not something that we're going to solve now, but we need to give it our best shot.

And I think it's particularly important that the farmers in these areas are rewarded to farm in a sustainable way, in terms of looking after the nature of the locality.

>> For hundreds and thousands of years, you know, bogs have been seen as a wasteland that, you know, aren't any good for anything.

They don't do anything for us.

We can't really make food from them in a very productive way.

But all along, for as long as they've existed, they've been our friend.

They've done things for us as a planet.

You know, we burn them for energy, for fuel.

We drain them to graze our sheep and cattle on.

But all along, they're trapping carbon.

They're taking it out of the atmosphere and locking it into the ground beneath our feet.

And that's been helping to keep our planet cool, even when we didn't know it.

>> The past speaks very loudly to you when you live somewhere like this.

It speaks to us in tremendous volume if we can listen to it properly.

Out here in West Kerry, there are traces all around us of civilizations that have risen and have fallen, and they're gone.

There is a sense of continuity.

And though things are changing, they're changing every generation, but, ultimately, people living in a landscape, they live surrounded by the past and they alter it and they change it and they repurpose it.

My perspective kind of is to look at the past as a way of informing us about where we are now.

And somewhere like here, you're reminded by it all the time.

I do a lot of what's called experimental archaeology.

I'm looking at, how did we get to be where we are in the world as a people, as a community, and, I suppose, as an individual, as well?

Really, we're just people in a place trying to figure it all out.

>> It's estimated that anywhere between 2 million to 6 million Irish people emigrated to the States over the last 200 years.

And Kerry would have been one of the counties with the largest proportion of immigrants.

So for people coming from countries looking to trace their ancestors and how they lived, this is one of the few places they can still get to see it and kind of smell it and touch it.

For a lot of farmers or a lot of locals that are kind of taking tours, they're sort of incorporating tourism into their existing life.

So it's supplemental to the life they're living.

In recent years, it's bringing in an income.

It may benefit from tourism, but it is not necessarily dependent on it.

You know, they may be poorer without it.

The fact that these people will be living here anyway, I think that's the important thing.

And that's what's attractive to a lot of people.

They're looking for that -- like, a true cultural difference.

Often, immigrants or children of immigrants returning back to Ireland, they often talk about a feeling they have when they come back to a place like Kerry that they can't really explain.

They say they feel that they belong there.

There's something in them.

>> There is that human need to try and make a connection to the past.

It's part of your identity.

We're tending to what we need now.

And what we need now is to be of now, but with a strong sense of our roots and where we're coming from.

Ritual ceremony are pretty much a human universal.

Coming together in ceremony, that collective joy -- I think that's something that people in the modern world really need.

♪♪ >> It's easy to become overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the narrative contained in a landscape like Kerry.

Ultimately, it will always be the individual human connections, be it with the landscape, our ancestors, or each other, that will allow us to make our own sense of the world.

♪♪ >> I spent a lot of my time in my late teens, 20s, even up to now kind of thinking about life and what's the point of it.

I think sitting on stone walls and chatting to people may be the point of life.

That might be it.

I think those moments where you're sitting and you're talking with someone, you're enjoying it, and you're literally -- To other cultures, you might be wasting a day, but I'm not sure that's what's happening anymore.

I think it may be the point of life.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Woman singing in Irish ] ♪♪ >> For those who feel a connection to Ireland's landscapes and people, through ancestral roots, ancient culture, or wild nature, "Kerry: Tides of Time" and its free companion booklet are available from Silver Branch Films.

With stunning imagery, maps, lore, and behind-the-scenes stories from the filmmaker, they offer deeper reflections on the people and places that shaped this land.

A beautiful way to share Ireland's story with someone who holds it close.

♪♪ >> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following.

♪♪ authentic Ireland travel experiences for over 55 years.

Your Celtic story starts here.

♪♪ away from laughter, music, heritage, and the arts.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪