Fulacht fia, Ahaneboy, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At Ahaneboy in County Kerry, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists above ground.
What once stood here was a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone, the accumulated debris of repeated heating and water-boiling over many centuries. These monuments are among the most common prehistoric remains in Ireland, yet this particular one was levelled by the landowner in 1966, leaving the site as little more than a coordinate on a map.
The Castleisland District Archaeological Survey, carried out in March 1990, recorded the monument as a mound of burnt stone, already gone by the time fieldworkers came to document it. It was nonetheless formally classified as a fulacht fiadh in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1990 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1997, acknowledging that something archaeologically significant had once occupied the ground at Ahaneboy, even if only the memory of it remained in the survey file. The destruction predated those records by nearly three decades.