In 1983, an amateur archaeologist walking the shore at Ferriter's Cove picked up a flint knife. He thought it might be Neolithic. The find drew the attention of Peter C. Woodman, professor of archaeology at University College Cork and the foremost authority on prehistoric Ireland, who excavated the site through the 1980s and into the 1990s. What Woodman's team found was a Mesolithic camp - shell dumps, hearths, a grindstone, marked sandstone pebbles, and five mudstone axes deposited together as if cached for a return that never happened. There were no formal burials, but scattered bits of human bone and two teeth came out of the deposits. Carbon dating placed them around 4,250 BC. Ferriter's Cove turned out to be a hinge - the last place where Irish foragers were still doing what their ancestors had done for thousands of years, just as the first farmers were beginning to arrive from across the sea.

Skip forward six millennia. In 1252, the name of one Walter le Fereter shows up twice on a plea roll - a court record from the Norman administration of Ireland. Le Fereter is Norman French for 'the ironworker' or possibly 'the farrier,' and Walter was probably one of the wave of Norman-Welsh adventurers who pushed west from Dublin in the decades after the 1169 invasion. He took up land at the end of the world. The Ferriter family clung to the Dingle Peninsula for centuries afterwards. The nearby village of Baile 'n Fheirtéaraigh - anglicized as Ballyferriter - still carries the family name, as does the cove. Most Irish coves are named for what they look like or what grows beside them. This one is named for an immigrant whose descendants outlasted the rest of the Norman colonial project.

Walk the headlands of Ferriter's Cove and you are walking on rocks half a billion years old. The cliffs at the northern end are Devonian, between 419 and 359 million years old, beginning with the coarse conglomerate of the Pointagare group and grading into sandstones of the Ballydavid and Farran formations. The southern cliffs are older still - Silurian igneous rock, between 444 and 419 million years old, including lavas and pyroclastic remnants from underwater volcanoes that erupted before Ireland had ever risen above the sea. The Foilnamahagh Formation makes up much of that southern wall. To a geologist, the cove is a textbook stratigraphic section. To everyone else, it is just a place where you can look at black volcanic rock and think about what it has seen.

The cove sits at the westernmost point of the Dingle Peninsula, which means it sits at the westernmost point of the European mainland's reach - the next land due west is Newfoundland. The weather reflects this. Mean temperatures recorded at nearby Baile 'n Fheirtéaraigh hover around 8 degrees Celsius in January and 16 degrees Celsius in July, but the numbers are deceptive. The real story is wind. Mean wind speeds peak around 39 kilometres per hour in November, and the gusts climb much higher. November rainfall averages 207 millimetres in a month. July gets 153 millimetres. There is rarely a day without weather of some kind. The Mesolithic people who camped here knew that better than anyone. They built their shelters facing east, away from the prevailing south-westerly, and they spent their summers eating whatever the sea would surrender between storms.

What the archaeologists found at Ferriter's Cove is mostly garbage. That is the nature of a Mesolithic shell midden - a heap of accumulated kitchen waste, slowly turning into rich dark soil over millennia. Among the limpets and oysters and periwinkles were bits of charcoal from old fires, flakes of flint chipped off while making knives, and the broken bones of the seals, fish and seabirds that the foragers caught. A grindstone suggests they processed plant foods. The five mudstone axes deposited together hint at something more than survival - perhaps a cache, perhaps an offering. Standing at the cove today, with the wind in your hair and the volcanic cliffs at your back, it is not hard to imagine the smoke rising from a fire on the same beach, the click of stone on stone, and a child losing a baby tooth in the shells.