Fulacht fia, Ballynoe, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Ballynoe, Co. Cork

In the pastureland of Ballynoe in north Cork, a prehistoric cooking site has effectively vanished.

A fulacht fia, the term for a type of Bronze Age outdoor cooking place typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water source, once showed clearly enough as a mound to be recorded on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1937. Today there is no visible trace at the surface.

The site sits on the north-eastern side of a stream that has since been deepened, an intervention that may well have altered the immediate landscape and contributed to the disappearance of whatever earthwork remained. What makes the location quietly interesting is that it does not stand alone. A second fulacht fia lies approximately seventy metres to the south-east, suggesting that this particular stretch of streamside ground was a focus of repeated activity during the Bronze Age. The clustering of such sites is not unusual; water was essential to the process, which involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the liquid to a boil, and suitable spots beside reliable streams naturally attracted use across generations.

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Pete F
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