Fulacht fia, Clogherane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In a field in Clogherane, County Kerry, a low grass-covered mound sits at the southern end of an ancient network of field boundaries, shaped like a horseshoe and built entirely from burnt material.
This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The method involved heating stones in a fire until they were hot enough to boil water when dropped into a nearby trough, usually timber-lined and sunk into the ground. The discarded, heat-shattered stones were piled beside the trough after each use, and it is precisely this accumulation of cracked, fire-blackened stone that forms the characteristic mound shape still visible today.
The Clogherane example measures roughly 7.7 metres east to west and 5.7 metres north to south, rising to just under a metre in height. Its opening, around 2 metres wide and 1.4 metres deep, faces south, and the burnt mound material is exposed along the western side where the grass cover has worn away. That it sits at the southern end of a field boundary network suggests the site was part of a wider organised landscape, perhaps connected to seasonal grazing or agricultural activity in the area, though the boundaries themselves belong to a separate monument record. What is quietly compelling about sites like this one is how ordinary the activity behind them was: the preparation of food, repeated over generations, leaving behind nothing more than a crescent of scorched stone that has outlasted almost everything else.