Fulacht fia, Croghtenclogh, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Settlement Sites
In the gently undulating farmland of Croghtenclogh, County Kilkenny, there is a prehistoric cooking site that has, in a very literal sense, disappeared.
A fulacht fia, the term used for a type of ancient outdoor cooking place common across Ireland and typically identified by a crescent-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, was recorded at this location, and then promptly swallowed by the landscape before anyone could get a proper look at it.
These sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, were used from the Bronze Age onwards. The basic method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil, leaving behind the characteristic spread of shattered, heat-damaged stone that marks the sites today. The Croghtenclogh example was identified by Prendergast in 1977, appearing in a published record of that year. By the time the site was visited in 1987, however, it was no longer visible at ground level. The reason is not mysterious: the field in which it sits had been reclaimed in the mid-1970s, agricultural improvement work that levelled or buried whatever surface trace had previously been detectable. The site was identified, noted, and then, within a decade of that identification, rendered effectively invisible by the very land management that prompted closer attention to the area in the first place.