Fulacht fia, Murrooghtoohy, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Murrooghtoohy, Co. Clare

On the limestone pavement of the Burren in County Clare, roughly 750 metres from the Atlantic shoreline, sits a horseshoe-shaped mound of grass and earth that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

It is, in fact, a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently puzzling monument types in the Irish archaeological record. These low crescent-shaped mounds are the burnt and discarded remnants of prehistoric cooking sites, where stones were heated in fire and dropped into water-filled troughs to bring them to the boil. The mound itself is the spoil heap of those shattered, fire-cracked stones, accumulated over repeated use. What makes this particular example quietly striking is its setting: not tucked into a boggy hollow, the environment where fulachtaí fia are most commonly found, but sitting flat on the bare karst rock of the Burren, a landscape more associated with Iron Age forts and early Christian churches than Bronze Age cooking places.

The mound measures 9.3 metres north to south and 7.6 metres east to west, opening to the north in the characteristic horseshoe form, and rises to about 0.6 metres at its highest point to the south. A protrusion extending inward from the southern end is thought to conceal one or more troughs beneath the surface, the stone-lined or timber-lined pits into which the heated rocks would have been dropped. The site was recorded by Cunningham in 1980, described simply as a grassy mound on the rocks, and it also appears on Tim Robinson's meticulous map of the Burren, produced in 1977. Robinson's cartographic work on the west of Ireland documented countless features that formal surveys had overlooked, and the appearance of this mound in his work suggests it was already recognised as something worth marking, even before its archaeological character was more formally assessed.

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