Fulacht fia, Knockychottaun, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Knockychottaun, Co. Mayo

In a patch of low-lying, rush-grown ground near Knockychottaun in County Mayo, a kidney-shaped mound of black, charcoal-rich soil and burnt stone had been sitting quietly for millennia before anyone recorded it.

It came to light in October 2015, not through excavation or academic survey, but during a field-walking exercise ahead of a road re-alignment scheme. The mound, which stretches roughly fourteen metres from northwest to southeast and eight and a half metres across, is the kind of thing that registers as little more than a slight rise in damp farmland, until you notice that the animals grazing there have eroded part of its southwest face and exposed what lies beneath.

What they revealed is the characteristic fill of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland and Britain. The basic principle was simple: water was heated in a trough by dropping fire-heated stones into it, and the discarded burnt and shattered stones, along with the surrounding charcoal-dark soil, accumulated over repeated use into a mound. These sites cluster in wetland and poorly drained ground, which is precisely where this one sits, close to the base of a ridge, with a field drain running five and a half metres to the south and an earthen bank three and a half metres to the east. A slight dip on the southwest side of the mound is interpreted as the likely position of the original trough. The mound rises to 0.85 metres at its highest point in the northwest and tapers to 0.45 metres toward the southeast, a gentle gradient that is typical of how these deposits accumulate and settle over time. The site was reported by Leo Morahan in February 2016.

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