Burnt mound, Rath, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In a flat, boggy field in County Mayo, a barely perceptible rise in the ground is all that remains visible of what may once have been a prehistoric cooking site.
The mound is so slight, and so levelled by time and agriculture, that its edges cannot be clearly defined. What survives at the surface amounts to little more than a scatter of burnt stone and charcoal roughly a metre across, sitting within a low swell of ground two to three metres in diameter.
When the site was examined in 1998, that modest patch of scorched material suggested the presence of a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking place found widely across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone accumulated beside a water trough or natural water source. The proximity to a drainage ditch fits the pattern, since these sites are almost always found in wet or waterlogged ground close to a ready water supply. Whether the mound here was always this flat, or whether it was levelled at some point by farming activity, could not be determined during inspection. A second fulacht fia lies roughly 65 metres to the north-west, suggesting the surrounding boggy ground was a favoured location for this kind of activity. Closer still, approximately 30 metres to the south-east, stands Rathnaguppaun Castle, a late medieval tower house, a reminder that the same land continued to attract human occupation across very different periods and for very different purposes.