Fulacht fia, Shrone, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Shrone, Co. Kerry

In a field of poorly drained pasture near Shrone in County Kerry, a large horseshoe-shaped mound sits quietly on a low natural ridge, its grassy surface giving little away to the passing eye.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The general principle involved heating stones in a fire, then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, after which the cracked and fire-shattered stones were raked aside into a mound. Over time, those discarded burnt stones accumulated into the characteristic curved or horseshoe shape that survives here, open to the southeast by a width of around ten metres.

The Shrone example is notably large, measuring approximately 35 metres on its east-west axis and up to 38 metres from north to south, placing it well above the typical scale for such sites. It sits in the north-eastern part of a gently undulating field that, despite agricultural improvement, remains prone to waterlogging, exactly the kind of low-lying, wetland-adjacent ground where fulachta fiadh are most commonly encountered. The site did not appear on historic Ordnance Survey mapping, and on modern aerial imagery it is barely discernible, which makes its scale on the ground all the more surprising. Relatively recent drainage work along the field boundaries to the north and east has altered the immediate landscape somewhat. A well is marked on all editions of the Ordnance Survey maps roughly twenty metres to the north, and a pump house stands in that vicinity today.

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Pete F
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