Fulacht fia, Walshtown More, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Walshtown More, Co. Cork

In the townland of Walshtown More, in County Cork, there is a Bronze Age cooking site that has, in a sense, vanished twice: once into the ground over several millennia, and again, more recently, into the altered landscape of a working farm.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient burnt mound, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped heap of fire-cracked stones and charcoal-rich soil, left behind after repeated episodes of heating stones and dropping them into water-filled troughs to cook food or, some argue, for other communal purposes. They are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet individually they are easy to miss, low and unassuming in the ground.

This particular example was recorded in 1997, sitting in a field locally known as the bog field, a name that in itself points to the kind of damp, low-lying ground these monuments consistently favour. Its dimensions were noted as roughly ten metres east to west, just under five metres north to south, and only about thirty centimetres high, a modest swell in the pasture rather than anything dramatic. When fieldworkers returned in 2002, they could not locate it. The removal of a field fence some ten metres to the east had altered the landscape sufficiently that the mound, never conspicuous to begin with, had effectively disappeared from the record. Whether it was disturbed in the process, buried under new soil movement, or simply made unrecognisable by the changed field boundaries is not known.

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