Fulacht fia, Eanty More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
In a flat-bottomed valley at Eanty More, enclosed on its sides by limestone cliffs roughly fifteen metres high and opening out to the southwest, a low oval mound sits quietly in rough pasture beside a stream.
It is easy to overlook, covered as it is by a thin layer of sod. But beneath that sod lies a mass of heat-shattered stones, the defining signature of a fulacht fia. These prehistoric cooking sites, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically worked by heating stones in a fire and then dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, leaving behind a characteristic horseshoe or oval mound of cracked and discarded rock. The mound here measures roughly five metres by four, and rises between thirty centimetres and a metre above the surrounding ground. It may once have been larger still; a scatter of small stones visible at the surface suggests the mound originally extended a further five metres or so to the northeast.
The site was identified in 1996 by Tom Coffey, and sits within what has been recognised as a large, multiperiod field system, suggesting that this particular corner of County Clare has been worked and inhabited across several distinct eras. The fulacht fia does not stand alone in the landscape. About 115 metres to the east lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. Some 155 metres to the northeast there is a holy well. The proximity of these three features, each from potentially different periods, gives the valley at Eanty More a quietly layered quality, a place where successive communities found reason to return, drawn perhaps by the reliable presence of the stream running along its western edge.
