Fulacht fia, Tooreenmore, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Tooreenmore, Co. Kerry

This modest mound in a sloping Kerry pasture never made it onto either edition of the Ordnance Survey maps.

It was a local person, not any official cartographic record, who pointed surveyors towards it in 1985, which is itself quietly telling: centuries of agricultural memory preserving what the mapmakers missed.

A fulacht fia (sometimes spelled fulacht fiadh) is a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland, typically comprising a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough and a reliable water source. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, the cracked and discarded stones accumulating over repeated use into the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound. At Tooreenmore, that horseshoe form is still legible, open to the south-south-west, though the surveyors noted that the outline may partly reflect later levelling of the site rather than its original shape alone. The mound measures 12.5 metres from east-south-east to west-north-west and 8.8 metres from north-north-east to south-south-west, with the rear of the mound rising to roughly 40 centimetres over a span of six metres on its north-north-east side. Crucially, the proximity to water that almost always characterises these sites is present here: a spring on the far side of the adjacent field fence forms a small pool immediately to the east of the mound, with a noticeably wet area extending between the two. The Castleisland District Archaeological Survey recorded all of this in 1985, and the site remains in a field of pasture, doing what such sites have done for a very long time, which is to say very little that is visible, but quite a lot that rewards attention.

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Pete F
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