Fulacht fia, Copsefield, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Copsefield, Co. Cork

In the scrubland at Copsefield in north County Cork, a low mound sits quietly beside a stream, its horseshoe shape still legible beneath years of vegetation.

It measures roughly 16 metres long, nearly 16 metres wide, and rises to about 1.4 metres at its highest point, with an opening of around 2 metres facing west-south-west. What fills the mound is not soil or rubble in any ordinary sense, but accumulated burnt stone, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia.

A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically dated to the Bronze Age, though examples span a wide range of periods. The usual arrangement involved a trough, often timber-lined or cut into the ground near a water source, which would be filled with water and then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Repeated heating and rapid cooling caused those stones to shatter, and over time the discarded fragments built up into the distinctive horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at sites like this one. The opening in the mound corresponds to where the trough would have sat. At Copsefield, the proximity to a stream about 15 metres to the west fits this pattern precisely, since a reliable water supply was essential to the whole process. The mound's heavily overgrown condition suggests it has seen little disturbance, which in archaeological terms is something of a virtue, even if it makes the site hard to read from the surface.

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Pete F
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