Fulacht fia, Flemingstown, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Flemingstown, Co. Cork

In a field of reclaimed pasture in Flemingstown, North Cork, there is a low, irregular mound of burnt and shattered stone that has sat largely unnoticed for several thousand years.

It measures sixteen metres long, sixteen metres wide, and rises to about one and a half metres at its highest point. That might sound unremarkable until you understand what it represents: a fulacht fia, the remains of a prehistoric cooking site, probably Bronze Age in origin, where stones were heated in fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The blackened, heat-cracked stones were discarded after use, and it is the accumulated pile of this debris that forms the mound visible today.

What makes Flemingstown genuinely unusual is not the presence of one such site but five. Within roughly ninety metres of this central mound, four further fulachtaí fia have been recorded, clustered tightly together in what would once have been a wet, low-lying landscape suitable for gathering water. The nearest sits around forty metres to the north-east, another approximately forty metres to the south-east, and two more between eighty and ninety metres to the south-east. Whether these represent a single community returning repeatedly to the same general area across generations, or near-simultaneous use by a larger group, is not something the surface evidence alone can answer. Such groupings are known elsewhere in Ireland, particularly in Munster, where fulachtaí fia occur in unusually high densities, but a cluster of five within such a compact area is notable by any measure. The surrounding land has long since been brought into agricultural use, which is precisely what has preserved the mounds rather than destroyed them; pasture disturbs the ground far less than tillage.

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Pete F
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