Fulacht fia, Curraghadobbin, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Settlement Sites
In the quiet farmland of Curraghadobbin in County Tipperary, a prehistoric cooking site lies completely out of sight, buried beneath an ordinary stretch of grass on a south-facing slope.
There is nothing to mark it, no mound, no depression, no stone poking through the soil. It exists, for now, entirely as a matter of record rather than visible presence.
The site is a fulacht fia, a type of monument found in large numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The name is an Old Irish term, and these sites are generally understood as outdoor cooking places, where water was boiled in a trough by adding stones heated in a nearby fire. The repeated heating and cooling of the stones caused them to crack and shatter, and the accumulated mounds of this fractured, fire-reddened stone, called burnt mounds, are usually what betrays a fulacht fia to the modern eye. At Curraghadobbin, however, the site lies on gently undulating terrain and shows no surface expression at all. It was identified by Will Forbes, whose observation brought it into the archaeological record despite its complete invisibility at ground level.