Fulacht fia, Nohaval Daly, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Nohaval Daly, Co. Cork

In a pasture to the south-west of a bog in Nohaval Daly, a low, grass-covered spread of burnt material is all that remains of what was once a circular mound about a metre high.

It measures roughly seven metres north to south, and were it not for the scorched, heat-shattered stone beneath the surface, it could pass for an unremarkable rise in the field. It did not disappear through any dramatic event; local information suggests it was simply levelled during a clearance of field fencing, the kind of quiet, incremental erasure that has claimed countless features of this sort across the Irish countryside.

The site is a fulacht fia, a category of monument found in enormous numbers throughout Ireland, particularly near wetlands and watercourses. The term refers to a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a trough for heating water using fire-heated stones, which were repeatedly cracked by thermal shock and discarded into a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt, fragmented rock. The proximity to bog here fits the pattern well, as such sites almost always appear near a reliable water source. This particular example may be the fulacht fiadh noted by a researcher named Bowman in 1934, recorded at that time as lying on land belonging to a D. Hickey. The connection is tentative rather than confirmed, but it places the site within a tradition of local observation stretching back nearly a century before its physical form was substantially altered.

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