Burnt spread, Islandearagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Burnt spread, Islandearagh, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing pasture slope in Islandearagh, with the twin hills of the Paps of Dana visible to the south-west, a layer of blackened, fire-cracked material sits in the bank of a small stream.

It is modest to look at, but what it represents is a technology in use across Ireland for perhaps three thousand years: the fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site in which water was heated by dropping fire-heated stones into a trough, causing the stones to shatter and accumulate over time as a characteristic mound of burnt and broken rock. The exposed layer here runs four metres north to south and reaches a depth of 0.7 metres, narrowing at both ends in the profile; some of the burnt material has also tumbled into the stream bed itself.

The site has a paper trail of sorts. In the 1940s, a Schools Manuscript for County Kerry recorded a fulacht fia measuring four feet square on land belonging to a man named Dan Donoghue, and this is that same site. The Schools Manuscript project, a nationwide initiative in which primary schoolchildren collected local folklore and historical information from their communities, captured brief descriptions of ancient monuments that might otherwise have gone unrecorded, and Donoghue's field evidently made enough of an impression to be noted down. More recently, drainage works in the pasture cut through the western bank of the stream and revealed the cross-section of burnt material that confirms what the old note described. Two further burnt spreads lie close by, one roughly fifteen metres to the east and another approximately 150 metres to the south, suggesting that this stretch of ground saw repeated or sustained activity of the same kind across what may have been a considerable span of time.

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Pete F
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