Fulacht fia, Ballyremon Commons, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Ballyremon Commons, Co. Wicklow

On the heathland of Ballyremon Commons in County Wicklow, on a gently southward-facing slope, there is thought to be a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones made red-hot in a nearby fire. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, and yet the one recorded here has never actually been confirmed on the ground.

The site was noted in the Archaeological Inventory of County Wicklow, published in 1997, on the basis of information provided by a P. Healy. Beyond that attribution and the brief description of its setting in heathland, nothing further was established. The record carries the stark notation "not located", meaning that attempts to find and verify the site in the field were unsuccessful. That ambiguity is itself worth sitting with. The heathland of Ballyremon Commons is the kind of open, low-lying ground where such monuments do appear, often as low, unassuming mounds easily mistaken for natural features or obscured by vegetation. Whether the site was recorded from local memory, an old map reference, or a glimpse from a distance, no one has been able to pin it down with any certainty.

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