Fulacht fia, Currahaly, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Currahaly, Co. Cork

In a pasture field in Currahaly, mid Cork, there is a spread of burnt material sitting quietly in the grass to the east of a field fence.

It has no monument, no marker, and no determined extent. What it almost certainly represents is a fulacht fia, one of the most numerous and yet least-visited class of archaeological site in Ireland, and one that still generates genuine debate among researchers trying to understand what these places were actually for.

A fulacht fia, sometimes called a burnt mound, is typically a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones and charcoal-blackened soil, usually found close to a water source. The conventional explanation is that they served as cooking sites, where stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, but competing theories have proposed uses ranging from textile processing to brewing to communal bathing. They are predominantly Bronze Age in date, and they occur in extraordinary numbers across Ireland, particularly in Munster. The example at Currahaly fits the general pattern in its setting, in pasture ground where the land has not been ploughed out, though its full dimensions remain unrecorded. The visible evidence amounts to a spread of burnt material, observed but not fully investigated.

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Pete F
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