Fulacht fia, Dromin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Dromin, Co. Kerry

Beneath the tarmac of a road in Dromin, County Kerry, lies the ghost of a Bronze Age cooking site, its only obituary a handful of burnt, shattered stones turned up by a mechanical digger.

No mound, no hollow, no surface feature marks the spot today.

What the digger disturbed was almost certainly a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking place found in very large numbers across Ireland. The typical form consists of a trough, often timber-lined, that would have been filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The stones, once used and cooled, were discarded nearby, accumulating over time into a low horseshoe-shaped mound of blackened, heat-fractured rock. These sites date predominantly to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, and tend to cluster near water sources, which the Kerry landscape supplies in abundance. The Dromin example came to light during road construction, and C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the find from local information, noting that no trace remained visible at ground level.

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