Fulacht fia, Knockanush, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Knockanush, Co. Kerry

Some sites earn their place in the historical record precisely because they have vanished.

On the boundary between the townlands of Knockanush East and Kerries East in County Kerry, a fulacht fia once sat in marshy ground beside a small stream, and there is now nothing whatsoever to see. A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone left behind after repeated use of a trough filled with water, heated by dropping fire-cracked rocks into it. They are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, and they tend to favour exactly the kind of low-lying, wet ground described here. This one has been entirely erased.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey second edition maps under the older spelling "fulacht fian", which at least fixes its former location with some precision, straddling the stream that once served as a natural townland boundary. According to research by Michael Connolly, whose PhD thesis on the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley near Tralee examined the broader landscape context of such sites, the monument was presumably levelled during land improvement works. The evidence left in the field is itself revealing in a quiet way: linear marks in the soil indicate that drainage pipes have been laid through the area, which would account both for the disturbance and for why marshy ground that once preserved such a site now drains freely enough to farm.

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