Fulacht fia, Drummond, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Drummond, Co. Wexford

By 1987, there was nothing left to see.

A low mound of charred stones and black earth, recorded in Drummond, County Wexford, had disappeared entirely into the surrounding pasture, leaving no trace at ground level. It is the kind of vanishing that happens quietly in Irish fields, where millennia of farming slowly reclaim what archaeology briefly names.

The site belongs to a class of monument known as a fulacht fia, a term referring to burnt mound sites found across Ireland and Britain, typically dating to the Bronze Age. The standard interpretation is that these were outdoor cooking sites: stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, producing the characteristic scatter of fire-cracked rock and darkened soil that survives long after the activity itself has ended. The Drummond example was described in 1939 by Ordnance Survey field workers as a mound roughly eight metres long, three and a half metres wide, and under a metre in height, sitting on level ground with a slightly lower basin about fifty metres to the east and north-east, possibly the remnant of the water source the site once relied upon. It appeared on the 1940 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, suggesting it was still a visible feature within living memory. A second fulacht fia lies approximately a hundred metres to the south-east, hinting that this stretch of Wexford countryside saw repeated use over a long period, even if the landscape now gives nothing away.

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