Fulacht fia, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

A routine planning application for two dwelling houses in County Limerick turned out to conceal something considerably older beneath the soil.

When archaeological testing was carried out at Cahirguillamore in 2004, excavators uncovered a fulacht fia, the Irish term for a type of Bronze Age burnt mound found in considerable numbers across Ireland and Britain. The basic principle behind these features is straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, and the spent, fire-cracked fragments were discarded in a crescent-shaped mound nearby. What accumulates over time is exactly what archaeologist Jacinta Kiely found here, a spread of burnt stone mixed through dark greyish brown silty clay, sitting on natural ground.

The mound at Cahirguillamore measured approximately 15 metres east to west and 11 metres north to south, making it a substantial example of its type. Kiely investigated the spread under licence number 04E1272, opening a small exploratory sondage, essentially a narrow test slot, through the deposit to a depth of 0.6 metres, finding the burnt layer to be up to 0.3 metres thick. The trough itself, the pit where the actual heating of water would have taken place, was not located. Notably, the southern half of the mound had been cut through by a field boundary that no longer exists on the ground, though it appears on the Ordnance Survey map from 1927. That boundary was absent from the 1840 mapping, suggesting it was a relatively modern agricultural division that quietly damaged the site before anyone knew the site was there. No other artefacts or archaeological features were recorded in the test trenches, leaving the mound somewhat isolated from its wider context, though a burial site does exist roughly 130 metres to the north-east.

The site lies in reclaimed pasture about 25 metres west of the townland boundary with Rockbarton, and around 280 metres south of the ruined Cahir Guillamore House. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey historic maps, which is itself telling: countless fulachta fia across Ireland went unrecorded simply because they blended into the agricultural landscape or were disturbed before systematic survey could catch them. This one only came to light because someone applied for planning permission. There is no formal visitor access, and the site sits within what is now ordinary farmland. For those with an interest in the archaeology of the wider area, the ruined house to the north provides a point of reference, and the broader Cahirguillamore complex to which this mound belongs is worth understanding as a layered, if largely invisible, archaeological landscape.

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