Fulacht fia, Kyle, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Settlement Sites
Sitting in a field of improved pasture in Kyle, County Tipperary, this ancient cooking site has the quietly compelling shape of something half-remembered.
The crescent form of the mound, roughly seventeen metres at its widest, is characteristic of the fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric outdoor cooking place found in considerable numbers across Ireland. The mound itself is composed of heat-shattered stone and dark, charcoal-rich soil, the accumulated debris of countless episodes of fire-lighting, stone-heating, and water-boiling. At the centre of the crescent sits the trough, approximately five metres across and nearly a metre deep in places, open to the south-southwest. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a nearby fire, then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it rapidly to the boil. Repeated use fractured the stones, and the spent fragments were gradually piled to either side, forming the characteristic horseshoe shape still visible today.
The mound itself is well-preserved toward its northern rear, where it reaches a height of 0.7 metres and a width of just over nine metres, tapering as the arms extend outward. The eastern and southern sectors have been truncated by a field fence, so the original extent is not fully legible from ground level. Most fulachta fiadh date to the Bronze Age, broadly speaking the period from around 2000 to 600 BC, though some examples in Ireland extend beyond those boundaries. What gives this particular site an additional point of interest is local information suggesting that a natural spring lies close to the southeast, within the young forestry that now flanks the monument on two sides. Access to a reliable water source is considered essential to the functioning of these sites, and the proximity of a spring here fits neatly with what the archaeology of fulachta fiadh elsewhere consistently shows.