Fulacht fia, Lisdangan, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Lisdangan, Co. Cork

In a pasture field in Lisdangan, north County Cork, a cluster of ancient cooking sites once occupied the ground beside a small stream.

What remains today is mostly invisible to the untrained eye, a spread of blackened, fire-cracked stone lying flush with the grass, but what it represents is a peculiarly intimate form of prehistoric life. These are fulachtaí fia, a term referring to burnt mounds that are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland. The standard interpretation is that they functioned as outdoor cooking sites, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to boiling point, a method used from the Bronze Age onwards.

At Lisdangan, at least four such sites cluster together within a short distance of one another, all positioned close to a stream, which would have supplied the water essential to the process. Two of the mounds were already documented on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937, meaning their horseshoe-shaped profiles were still legible in the landscape at that point. Since then, all three of the closely grouped mounds have been levelled, likely through agricultural activity over the intervening decades. A large spread of burnt material survives across the area, and notably incorporates material from what is described as a teach mound, suggesting one of the features may have had a structural or roofed element associated with it. A fourth site lies immediately to the east, hinting that this stretch of ground saw repeated or prolonged use across time.

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