Fulacht fia, Commons, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
Four Bronze Age cooking sites cluster together in a damp corner of County Clare, so close to one another that the largest pair are separated by just four metres of rough pasture.
That density is unusual. Fulachtaí fia, the plural of fulacht fia, are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, typically appearing as low, horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone, the accumulated debris of repeated episodes of heating water in a trough. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, then dropped into a water-filled pit to bring it to the boil, most likely for cooking. What makes the Commons site quietly interesting is not any single example but the grouping: four recorded monuments within roughly seventeen metres of each other, gathered around what was evidently a reliable water source.
The mound described here is modest in scale, a grass-covered horseshoe roughly seven metres by six metres, rising to just under half a metre in height and open to the south-west. Its interior, rush-covered and slightly sunken to a depth of about half a metre, measures two metres by just over one metre, consistent with the trough dimensions seen at comparable sites elsewhere in Ireland. The ground itself tells part of the story. The site sits on semi-karst terrain, that is, limestone country where water moves unpredictably through fissures and the surface can be seasonally wet or dry. Here the land is low and damp at the northern end of a rush-covered area with periodic surface water, and a spring recorded on the 1897 twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map lies just to the north-west. That combination of accessible water and karst ground helps explain why prehistoric people returned to this spot repeatedly. Tom Coffey reported the site, and it was formally listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996.
The four fulachtaí fia at Commons sit in rough pasture and are largely indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape to the untrained eye, their profiles low and their interiors overgrown with rushes that signal the damp ground beneath. The horseshoe shape, once you know to look for it, is the clearest indicator, an arc of raised stony material with one open end facing downslope or toward the former trough area.
