Fulacht fia, Muckalee, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Muckalee, Co. Kilkenny

In the rolling grassland of Muckalee, a Bronze Age cooking site lies buried beneath an ordinary-looking field, invisible to anyone walking across it.

The site is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient outdoor cooking place typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone, the debris of repeated heating. Water would be boiled in a trough by dropping fire-heated stones into it, the stones cracking in the process and accumulating into the characteristic mound over time. Here, that mound has either been levelled or lies deep enough beneath the surface that nothing breaks through to signal its presence.

What makes the location striking is not the site itself, which cannot be seen, but the density of what surrounds it. Prendergast, writing in 1955, recorded three fulachta fia clustered within this small area, with two further examples sitting roughly twenty-five and thirty metres away to the north-west and north-east respectively. The ground slopes gently down towards the valley floors of the Dinin and Douglas rivers, and a small stream runs along the southern boundary of the field. That combination, a reliable water source, soft ground near a watercourse, and proximity to open grazing land, is precisely the kind of setting where fulachta fia are repeatedly found across Ireland, often in groups, suggesting repeated or communal use of a favoured spot across generations.

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Pete F
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