Fulacht fia, Glanycummane, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Glanycummane, Co. Cork

At Glanycummane in North Cork, a low mound of burnt stone sits in rough grazing land, barely forty centimetres above the surrounding ground.

To walk past it without knowing what it was would be easy enough. But this uneven, partially overgrown oval is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The general idea is straightforward: stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to a boil, after which meat could be cooked. The discarded, heat-shattered stones accumulated over time into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today.

What makes the Glanycummane example quietly remarkable is not the mound itself but its company. Within roughly two hundred metres, four more fulachtaí fia have been recorded in the same area, one about a hundred metres to the south-east, another around two hundred and ten metres to the south-west, and two more clustered within a hundred and forty metres to the south and south-east. The mound itself measures nearly twenty-four metres along its longer axis and just over fifteen metres across, placing it at a respectable size. It lies around sixteen metres from a well, which is consistent with the strong association these sites have with water sources, whether springs, streams, or boggy ground. Whether this particular cluster represents repeated use of a favoured landscape over many generations, or something more organised, is not something the surviving earthworks can answer on their own.

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