Fulacht fia, Fallakeeran, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Fallakeeran, Co. Mayo

In the reclaimed pastureland of Fallakeeran, Co. Mayo, a scatter of burnt stone and charcoal in otherwise unremarkable flat ground marks a site that was already ancient when the Iron Age began.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of burnt mound found widely across Ireland and thought to represent outdoor cooking or food-processing sites from the Bronze Age, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a water-filled trough. At Fallakeeran, even that familiar outline is largely gone.

The site came to light not through deliberate fieldwork but as a consequence of infrastructure. During archaeological monitoring of the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme between 2001 and 2002, the mound was identified and subsequently fully excavated. By the time archaeologists reached it, it had been heavily disturbed by more recent activity, and only a small residual deposit remained, roughly two metres in one direction and five in the other, consisting of burnt stone and charcoal. No trough survived. A single fragment of cattle bone was recovered from the material. A charcoal sample submitted for radiocarbon dating returned a result of 2992 plus or minus 26 BP, placing the site's use somewhere between 1320 and 1120 BC, in the Middle to Late Bronze Age. What makes the location quietly remarkable, despite its reduced condition, is its context: another burnt mound sits approximately 35 metres to the south-south-west, a second lies around 100 metres to the south-west, and a further fulacht fia was recorded about 150 metres to the north-east. Whatever drew people to this low-lying ground over three thousand years ago, they returned to it, or others did, repeatedly.

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