Burnt spread, Gortnaprocess, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Burnt spread, Gortnaprocess, Co. Kerry

There is a field in Gortnaprocess, on the western bank of a stream, where something ancient was scattered and buried by the work of agriculture.

What was once a substantial mound, some six metres across and nearly a metre high, no longer rises from the ground at all. The burnt material that gave it form was dispersed during land reclamation, and the site now sits quietly beneath pasture, invisible to anyone walking over it.

The mound was a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped spread of fire-cracked stones and charcoal left behind by repeated use. They are thought to date mainly from the Bronze Age and are usually found near water, consistent with the method of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The Gortnaprocess example was documented in the 1940s Schools Manuscript, a large folklore and local knowledge collection compiled by pupils and teachers across Ireland, which recorded the mound standing on John Breen's land. That record captured it as twenty feet in circumference and three feet high, a modest but complete monument at the time of writing. By the time it was surveyed more recently, the physical evidence had been scattered across the slope, the south-facing ground overlooking the distant outline of the Paps of Dana to the southwest.

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Pete F
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