Burnt mound, Nash, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Burnt mound, Nash, Co. Wexford

In a field near Nash in County Wexford, a patch of scorched and shattered stones surfaces in the soil whenever the land is ploughed.

The oval spread, roughly fourteen metres by nine, is all that remains visible of a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site found widely across Ireland and Britain. These features are generally understood to have functioned as cooking places, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into water-filled troughs to bring the liquid to a boil, the repeated thermal shock eventually cracking and blackening the stones into the characteristic rubble that gives such sites their name.

The location follows a pattern well known from comparable sites. The mound sits on a gentle west-facing slope, with the headwaters of a north-south stream running some 180 metres to the west, providing the reliable water source that burnt mounds almost invariably require. A second burnt mound lies approximately 40 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting that this stretch of ground saw repeated, perhaps overlapping, episodes of activity at some point in prehistory, most likely during the Bronze Age, when burnt mounds were most commonly in use across Ireland. The pairing of two such features in close proximity is not unusual, though it adds a quiet layer of interest to what might otherwise read as an unremarkable agricultural field.

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