Fulacht fia, Baile Na Saor Beag, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In a patch of rough, marshy pastureland on the eastern bank of a small Kerry river, a low horseshoe of burnt and fire-shattered stones curves quietly around an empty central hollow.
This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of heat-cracked stones discarded beside a trough that was once filled with water and brought to the boil by dropping heated stones into it. The mound here measures fifteen metres north to south and thirteen and a half metres east to west, and it rises just over half a metre above the sub-circular area it almost completely encloses, leaving only a narrow gap to the south. It is an unshowy thing, easy to overlook in the wet pasture.
What makes this particular site quietly compelling is not the mound itself but its company. Three further fulachta fiadh have been recorded just two hundred and fifty metres to the south, on the bank of the same river. The clustering of these sites along a single watercourse points to repeated, purposeful activity in the same stretch of ground, whether for cooking, hide-working, or other purposes that archaeologists still debate. The site at Baile Na Saor Beag was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a comprehensive study of the Corca Dhuibhne region produced under the Irish name Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, which translated the landscape's prehistoric and early historic remains into a lasting record. The mound's composition, those small stones cracked and discoloured by repeated heating and quenching, is the accumulated residue of an activity carried out perhaps hundreds or thousands of times over.