Fulacht fia, Baile Uí Uaithnín, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Baile Uí Uaithnín, Co. Kerry

On the eastern bank of a Kerry river, a low horseshoe-shaped mound sits in slow conversation with the water beside it.

The river has already eaten into its western side, dropping away roughly two metres to the waterline, and a holly tree has pushed further into the western end. What remains is roughly eleven metres long, seven metres wide, and just over a metre tall, composed of blackened soil and fragments of burnt stone. This combination is the signature of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found across Ireland, typically Bronze Age in date, where stones were heated in fire and plunged into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil. The crescent shape so common to these monuments is formed by the gradual accumulation of discarded burnt stone around the trough, building up over repeated use into exactly the kind of low, dark mound visible here.

The site was recorded and described by Cuppage in 1986, who noted a square depression at the north-eastern side of the mound measuring roughly 2.4 metres by 2.4 metres, likely the position of the original trough. A large flat stone partly exposed at the depression's eastern edge may have formed part of a revetment, a lining to stabilise the trough's sides, and earthfast boulders a short distance to the north-east may have served a similar structural purpose. One further detail gives the mound an unexpected administrative significance: a wall running northward from it marks the boundary between the townlands of Ballyhoneen and Kilmore. Elsewhere that boundary follows the centre of the river, but here the ancient mound itself has been absorbed into the logic of later land division, sitting quietly at the point where two townlands meet.

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