Burnt mound, Knockaderry, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Burnt mound, Knockaderry, Co. Waterford

On an east-facing slope in Knockaderry, County Waterford, there is an archaeological site that nobody locally seems to know exists. The ground shows nothing. There is no depression, no scatter of stone, no folk memory attached to the field. Yet somewhere beneath the pasture lies a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone left over from repeated cycles of heating rocks and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. They are among the most common field monuments in the Irish landscape, and yet this one has slipped entirely out of living awareness.

The site was first noted in the 1950s, recorded in a National Museum of Ireland file, which suggests it came to attention through some form of field observation or local report at the time. A second, related burnt mound lies roughly 180 metres to the east-northeast, close to a north-south stream approximately 190 metres from the main site. That proximity to water is characteristic; fulacht fiadh sites are almost always found near a reliable water source, since the whole process depended on it. Beyond that initial mid-twentieth-century notice, however, the site appears to have generated little further attention, and by the time the County Waterford archaeological inventory was compiled, it was recorded as not visible at ground level and unknown to local people.

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Pete F
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