Fulacht fia, Cappaphaudeen, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Cappaphaudeen, Co. Cork

A farm track cuts straight through the middle of it, which is perhaps the most honest summary of how Bronze Age archaeology tends to fare in the Irish countryside.

The site at Cappaphaudeen is a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking or processing site found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically identified by the low, horseshoe-shaped mound of cracked and fire-blackened stone left behind after repeated heating and water boiling. This particular example sits in rough grazing ground, about twenty metres south-west of a well, and what remains is a partially levelled circular mound of burnt material measuring roughly fifteen metres across and less than a metre in height. Three smaller subsidiary mounds survive along its eastern, south-south-western, and north-western edges, suggesting the original spread of activity around the site.

The mound was probably the same one noted by Bowman in 1934, recorded in association with land belonging to a J. Gleeson. That reference places at least some formal awareness of the site in the early twentieth century, though the intervening decades have not been kind to it. The farm track that now bisects the mound from north-west to south-east has done the kind of gradual, unremarkable damage that tends to go undocumented, each pass of a vehicle compressing or displacing material that took considerable effort to accumulate over what may have been centuries of use. Fulachtaí fia, the plural form, are so numerous in the Irish landscape, with estimates running into the tens of thousands nationally, that individual examples like this one rarely attract sustained attention unless excavation is planned or accidental disturbance forces the issue.

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