Fulacht fia, Curracahill, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Curracahill, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at Curracahill now, and that absence is itself a small piece of history.

Somewhere on what was Dan Healy's farm, a prehistoric cooking site once sat in a modest fieldeen, roughly thirty feet across and three feet above the surrounding ground. By the early 1980s it was gone, cleared away during agricultural works around 1983, leaving no visible trace on the surface.

The site belonged to a category of monument that turns up with remarkable frequency across the Irish countryside. A fulacht fia, sometimes spelled fulacht fiadh, is a burnt mound, typically the accumulated debris of repeated open-air cooking over many centuries. The usual method involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil; the cracked and shattered stones were then raked aside, gradually building up the characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound around the trough. Many date to the Bronze Age, though some remained in use well into the early medieval period. The horseshoe shape recorded here at Curracahill was entirely typical of the form. In 1937, a recorder named Broker noted its dimensions and location on Healy's farm, capturing a site that was, even then, just a low earthen mound in a small field. That record, made nearly fifty years before the mound was removed, is now the only evidence that it existed at all.

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