Fulacht fia, Mausrower, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Mausrower, Co. Kerry

In a south-facing pasture in Mausrower, County Kerry, there is a prehistoric cooking site that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

A fulacht fia, the term for a type of ancient outdoor cooking place typically associated with Bronze Age Ireland, would once have consisted of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones beside a trough, often near a water source. The mound at Mausrower has since flattened into the surrounding farmland, leaving no visible trace for a visitor today.

What survives is the paper record. A 1980 report described a conical mound twelve metres in diameter and 1.2 metres high, sitting on the downhill side of a well in marshy ground, roughly four metres from the water's edge. Burnt material was also observed breaking through a field boundary a short distance to the west. This site is likely one of a pair of fulachtaí fia noted in the 1940s on land then belonging to a man named William Daly. Those earlier measurements, recorded in the Schools Manuscript collection for County Kerry, were considerably more imposing: a mound some 15 metres across and three metres high, with a hollow at its centre measuring approximately 2.7 metres by 0.9 metres. That hollow almost certainly represents the remains of the cooking trough, where water would have been heated by dropping fire-warmed stones directly into it. The discrepancy between the 1940s dimensions and those from 1980 suggests the mound had already been considerably reduced by agricultural activity within those intervening decades, and has since disappeared entirely.

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