Fulacht fia, Commons (Connello Upper By.), Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Commons (Connello Upper By.), Co. Limerick

A Bronze Age site in County Limerick first came to light not through careful survey work but through the accidental intervention of a construction machine.

The low mound of burnt material that had sat quietly in a flat pasture field was levelled without authorisation during pipeline works, and only when archaeologists examined what remained did the full picture begin to emerge. What they found was, in some respects, a classic fulacht fia, the term used for the distinctive burnt mounds that appear across Ireland in their thousands, generally associated with Bronze Age activity involving the heating of water using fire-cracked stones. But this one refused to behave quite as expected.

The excavation was carried out by Tony Bartlett and Kate Taylor under reference 02E0660, as part of Bord Gáis Éireann's Pipeline to the West project. The central feature was a large, irregularly sub-oval pit measuring up to 6.45 metres by 5.95 metres and reaching 1.35 metres in depth, with gently sloping sides to the south and steeper walls to the north. When the team dug into it, the pit filled with water to roughly 0.35 metres, reflecting the level of the present water table, and this same waterlogging had helped preserve organic material at the base including seeds, hazelnuts, and what may have been hazel twigs. The single fill deposit was dark, charcoal-rich, and contained approximately half heat-shattered stones by volume. A shallow gully nearly six metres long ran from the pit towards a later field drain, possibly functioning as an overflow channel or a means of directing water in. Despite all this evidence of fire and water, the two features most commonly associated with fulacht fia activity were entirely absent: there was no hearth and no trough. The pit itself remains the interpretive puzzle at the centre of the site, its precise function unresolved.

The site lies on what was flat pastureland in the Commons townland of the old barony of Connello Upper, and there is no public monument or marker at the location. The archaeological deposit has been substantially disturbed by the machining that first exposed it, and the pipeline construction that prompted the excavation has long since been completed. Any visit to the general area is therefore more a matter of landscape context than direct access to remains. The broader countryside of this part of Limerick is well furnished with similar Bronze Age burnt mounds, many of which survive as low, inconspicuous rises in damp ground, easily overlooked precisely because they are so numerous and so modest in scale.

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