Fulacht fia, An Cheathrú Bhán, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, An Cheathrú Bhán, Co. Galway

At An Cheathrú Bhán in Co. Galway, two ancient cooking sites sit so close together that the boundary between them is almost impossible to read in the landscape.

One appears to press directly against the other, their mounded remains overlapping at the south-west, and the question of where one ends and the next begins has no simple answer.

A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking place, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a timber-lined trough into which heated stones were dropped to boil water. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, yet they still carry a degree of mystery, not least about the full range of activities they served. At this site, the rear of the mound is unusually wide, reaching a maximum of seven metres, with an external height of 0.8 metres. A truncated arm of what may be a second fulacht fia survives at the south-west, its stump pointing towards a north-west to south-east trackway that likely cut across it at some point, removing part of the structure. On the opposing side, a drystone well, built from stones laid without mortar, appears to occupy the very position where a second trough would otherwise be expected to sit. The implication is quietly striking: whoever sank the well may have done so directly into the footprint of an earlier cooking monument, perhaps unknowingly, or perhaps making deliberate use of ground already associated with water and activity. The loss of that second arm and the presence of the well in its place suggest a layering of use across different periods, each intervention quietly erasing or absorbing what came before.

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