Fulacht fia, Kilmichael Hill, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Kilmichael Hill, Co. Wexford

In a quiet stream valley on Kilmichael Hill in County Wexford, a low kidney-shaped mound of stones sits just twenty metres from a watercourse, looking at first glance like little more than a grassy hump in the field.

It measures five metres long, less than three metres wide, and barely half a metre at its highest point. Nothing about its modest profile announces what it is, yet it belongs to a category of monument found in the thousands across Ireland, one that has been accumulating scholarly debate for the better part of two centuries.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site that typically consists of a burnt and fire-cracked stone mound beside a water source. The prevailing interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to a boil, cooking meat or perhaps serving other purposes including brewing or bathing. The proximity to the stream here fits that pattern well. What makes this particular spot quietly interesting is that it does not stand alone. A second fulacht fia lies roughly ninety metres to the west-northwest along the same stream, and a standing stone occupies the same general vicinity. The clustering of these monument types, a pair of cooking sites and an upright prehistoric stone within such a short distance of one another, suggests this stretch of valley was a place of some repeated or sustained significance in prehistory, even if the precise relationship between the three monuments is impossible now to reconstruct.

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Pete F
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