Fulacht fia, Killinardrish, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Killinardrish, Co. Cork

A single field in Killinardrish, County Cork, contains not one but five fulachta fiadh, the remains of prehistoric cooking sites that were once scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left behind after repeated episodes of water-boiling: stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, and discarded once they shattered from thermal shock. The cumulative debris formed the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mounds that survive across Ireland today, often in low-lying or waterlogged ground. The concentration of five such sites within a single field is unusual enough to give pause.

The example recorded here lies in what is now reclaimed pasture, just to the west of a well. The spread of burnt material measures roughly ten metres north to south and twenty-four metres east to west. Local information suggests the mound stood about a metre high before it was levelled, presumably during agricultural improvement of the land. Two further fulachta fiadh sit approximately fifteen metres and forty metres to the east, and two more lie to the south of this site. Whether they represent broadly contemporary use of a favoured spot, or accumulated activity across a longer stretch of prehistory, is not clear from what survives above ground. Excavations reported in 2001 and 2003 examined related material, though the proximity to a water source, the well to the east, fits the pattern seen at fulachta fiadh elsewhere, where reliable water was a basic requirement of the process.

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