Fulacht fia, Drom, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Drom, Co. Cork

Scattered across the Irish countryside, often overlooked as natural humps in the ground, fulachta fiadh are among the most common prehistoric monuments in the country, and one quiet example at Drom in County Cork sits in rough grazing on a gentle east-facing slope, its crescent shape still legible after thousands of years.

A fulacht fia is essentially a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a hearth for heating stones, and the characteristic horseshoe or crescent-shaped mound of discarded, heat-shattered stones that builds up around the trough over repeated use. The stones crack and fragment when heated and plunged into water, and it is exactly this kind of fire-fractured material, mixed with charcoal-enriched soil, that forms the mound at Drom.

The mound itself is modest in scale, measuring roughly seven metres on its northeast to southwest axis and four and a half metres across the northwest to southeast axis, rising to just 0.45 metres at its highest point. Its opening, about 1.3 metres wide, faces northwest. The site is ringed by blanket bog, shallow at between 0.2 and 0.5 metres deep, which will have helped preserve the monument by keeping the surrounding ground waterlogged and relatively undisturbed. What makes this particular location quietly interesting is that it does not stand alone: a larger fulacht fia lies approximately one metre to the southwest, suggesting that this stretch of slope at Drom saw repeated or sustained activity, perhaps over generations, during the Bronze Age.

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