Fulacht fia, Curragh, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Curragh, Co. Cork

On a hillside at Curragh in County Cork, partly swallowed by bog, sits a low U-shaped arrangement of stones that most walkers would step over without a second thought.

It measures five metres long and four metres wide, open at the eastern side, and beside its northern arm there rises a roughly oval mound of burnt material, still about eighty centimetres high. Together they mark the remains of a fulacht fia, a type of site found in great numbers across Ireland and typically associated with the Bronze Age, though their exact purpose has been debated for decades. The most widely accepted interpretation is that they functioned as cooking sites: stones were heated in fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, the cracked and shattered fragments accumulating over time into the characteristic mound of scorched material that survives beside the stones here.

The setting is unassuming, rough grazing ground on the slope immediately south of a coniferous plantation. The stones visible today may originally have formed an internal revetment, essentially a lining or retaining edge, for the mound itself, with only a portion of the original structure remaining intact. Some of the mound material has already been lost: local information indicates that a quantity was removed when a fire-break was dug for the adjacent forestry. It is a small, quiet loss of the kind that happens to unguarded prehistoric sites throughout the country, gradual and largely unwitnessed, leaving a slightly deflated version of what was once there.

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Pete F
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