Fulacht fia, Killeenadeema, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Killeenadeema, Co. Galway

There is nothing left to see at this spot near Killeenadeema in County Galway, and that absence is part of what makes it worth knowing about.

A low, grass-covered mound once sat on low-lying, recently drained marshy ground, roughly twenty-five metres east of a small stream. When it was cleared away, burnt stone and cinders emerged from beneath, the characteristic signature of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in considerable numbers across Ireland. The working theory is that these sites, typically Bronze Age in origin, involved heating stones in a fire and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, with the cracked and discarded stones accumulating over time into the horseshoe-shaped or circular mounds that survive in the landscape today.

The mound at Killeenadeema was recorded on the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular feature under ten metres in diameter, which places it firmly in the smaller range for such sites. The local landowner knew it as a cooking place, a piece of oral knowledge that quietly echoed what archaeologists would eventually recognise as a pattern across hundreds of similar sites. That vernacular memory, passed down without any formal archaeological framework, turned out to be essentially correct. By the time anyone thought to document it properly, however, the mound had already been cleared, and no visible surface trace now survives.

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