Fulacht fia, Kilmore, Co. Tipperary

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Kilmore, Co. Tipperary

Cattle grazing on a west-facing slope in Kilmore, County Tipperary, have inadvertently done what archaeologists spend years trying to do: expose what lies beneath.

Their hooves have worn through the sod at the centre of a low, roughly oval mound to reveal a mass of heat-shattered stone, the unmistakable signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The usual interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point, a method that leaves behind a characteristic crescent or horseshoe-shaped mound of cracked and blackened stone mixed with charcoal-rich soil. The mound at Kilmore fits this pattern closely. It measures roughly sixteen metres east to west and twelve metres north to south, and is defined on its south-south-east to north-north-east axis by a gentle scarp about four metres wide and thirty centimetres high. The dark, organic soil and the abundant fractured stone visible where the livestock have broken the surface are consistent with centuries, possibly millennia, of repeated burning and quenching. The mound has been levelled rather than left in its original raised form, which is common where land has been used for grazing over long periods.

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