Fulacht fia, Mooretown (Nethercross By.), Co. Dublin

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Fulacht fia, Mooretown (Nethercross By.), Co. Dublin

A wicker-lined trough sitting beside an ancient holy well is not a combination that announces itself easily in the landscape of north County Dublin, yet that is precisely what geophysical survey and subsequent excavation revealed at Mooretown, in the old barony of Nethercross.

The feature in question is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland and Britain, typically consisting of a water-filled trough and a surrounding mound of heat-shattered stone left over from repeated cycles of heating rocks in fire and dropping them into water to bring it to the boil. What sets this particular example apart is the detail of its construction and the company it keeps.

The site came to light not through chance agricultural disturbance but through a geophysical survey carried out under licence number 06R067 ahead of a proposed development in the area. That non-invasive survey flagged anomalies in the ground that were then confirmed by test excavation under licence number 08E0303. What the excavators found were two charcoal-rich spreads, each up to six metres in diameter, filled with fire-cracked stone, the classic debris of repeated high-temperature cooking episodes. At the centre of this activity was an oval trough, roughly 1.75 metres in diameter, and lined with wicker-work, a construction detail recorded by Frazer in 2008. Wicker lining helped to stabilise the trough walls and may have slowed water loss into surrounding soil. The proximity to St Cronan's well adds a further layer of interest; holy wells in Ireland frequently mark much older sacred or practical water sources, and the co-location of a fulacht fia with such a feature suggests the spot was drawing people to its water long before any Christian association was attached to it.

The Mooretown fulacht fia is not a site with a visitor car park or an interpretive panel. It was identified in the context of development work, and access to the precise location would require checking with the relevant landowner and local planning records. The National Monuments Service record for St Cronan's well carries the reference DU011-018----, which can be used as a starting point for anyone researching the broader landscape of the area through the Sites and Monuments Record. The well itself may be the more locatable feature on the ground, and finding it would at least place a visitor in the right general vicinity to appreciate how these two features, one prehistoric, one later, came to share the same patch of Fingal farmland.

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