Fulacht fia, Cross More, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Cross More, Co. Clare

In a boggy valley floor in Cross More, Co. Clare, a low horseshoe-shaped mound sits beside a stream, its opening facing south-east toward the water.

To a passing eye it might read as nothing more than a grassy rise in rough pasture, but the blackened soil and heat-shattered stone visible within its trough betray a very different purpose. This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire, dropped into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, and used to cook meat, though some researchers have proposed additional uses including textile dyeing or brewing.

The mound here measures roughly ten metres north-west to south-east and up to fourteen metres on its other axis, with the characteristic open end, about three and a half metres wide, facing the adjacent stream or land drain. The trough itself is clearly defined, running approximately six metres by five metres, and the evidence of intense, repeated heating is still legible in the scorched and fractured stone that accumulated over years or generations of use. The monument is covered in dense scrub, which obscures it visually but has also helped preserve it from the kind of agricultural disturbance that has destroyed so many comparable sites elsewhere. About 155 metres to the north-west lies a ringfort, one of the circular enclosed settlements common across early medieval Ireland, a reminder that this valley floor has drawn human activity across a considerable span of time.

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Pete F
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