Fulacht fia, Coornacaragh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Coornacaragh, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope above Lough Inchiquin, a low D-shaped mound sits quietly in rough hill pasture, its straight edge slowly being eaten away by the stream running alongside it.

The mound is modest by most measures, roughly four metres north to south and just under a metre high, covered in sod and packed with burnt material. What makes it worth pausing over is not its size but its type and its company: this is a fulacht fia, and it is not alone.

A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age, built around the principle of heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boils. The process leaves behind exactly what is visible here: a mound of fire-cracked, heat-shattered stone and charcoal, dark and dense beneath the grass. These sites are extraordinarily common across Ireland, numbering in the thousands, yet each one represents a repeated, deliberate act of communal use over what may have been generations. What sets Coornacaragh apart is the clustering. A second fulacht fia lies immediately to the south-west, and a burnt spread has been recorded on the opposite bank of the same stream. Three related sites gathered around a single watercourse suggests this was not an incidental stopping point but a location returned to, possibly over a long period, by people who knew exactly what the stream and the slope could offer them.

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Pete F
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