Fulacht fia, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Letter, Co. Kerry

At the western end of an archaeological complex near Letter in County Kerry, a low crescent-shaped mound sits quietly in the landscape, its blackened earth and fire-cracked stones marking it out as something older and stranger than it first appears.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe or crescentic mound of heat-shattered stone surrounding a trough that would once have been filled with water and brought to the boil by dropping in stones heated in a nearby fire. Thousands of these monuments survive across the country, yet each one carries the same quiet strangeness: the accumulated debris of repeated burning, heating, and discarding, compressed into a mound that can endure for three or four thousand years.

This particular example measures 8.9 metres north to south and 7 metres east to west, with the mound open to the west. At its centre sits a depression measuring 2.2 metres by 1.8 metres, almost certainly the location of the original trough. The mound itself is composed of the characteristic material found at such sites: fire-shattered stone and blackened earth, the residue left behind after countless cycles of heating. Its crescentic form is well preserved, and it sits as part of a wider complex of monuments in the area, suggesting that this part of the Iveragh Peninsula saw sustained activity over a considerable period. The site was documented as part of a detailed archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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