Fulacht fia, Curra, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Curra, Co. Cork

In a pasture field in Curra, County Cork, a low oval mound sits quietly in grass, its surface recently disturbed by ploughing.

It measures roughly twenty metres north to south and sixteen and a half metres from west-southwest to east-northeast, rising only about seventy centimetres above the surrounding ground. Unassuming to any passing eye, it is in fact the remains of a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape.

A fulacht fia is a prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, consisting of a trough into which water was poured and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. Those shattered, heat-damaged stones were then raked aside after each use, gradually accumulating into the horseshoe-shaped or oval mounds that survive today. The site at Curra follows a pattern seen repeatedly across Ireland: a close association with water. Here the mound lies to the southeast of a spring, though that spring has since dried up. The water source that would once have made the spot practical for repeated use is now gone, leaving only the dark, crumbly spread of burnt stone as evidence of what happened here across what may have been many generations of use.

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Pete F
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