Fulacht fia, Solsborough, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Settlement Sites
A fulacht fia is, in essence, a Bronze Age cooking or industrial site, typically identified by a spread or mound of fire-cracked stones left behind after repeated cycles of heating and water-boiling.
The example at Solsborough, in County Tipperary, is unusual in its shape: rather than the rounded or horseshoe mound most commonly associated with these sites, it presents as a long, linear scatter of burnt stone running roughly forty metres east to west and only about ten metres across from north to south.
The site came to light in 1999, when archaeologists Hughes and O'Brien were carrying out fieldwalking along the ploughed corridor of the planned N52 Nenagh Bypass link road. Ground disturbance from the road scheme had already broken up the spread across the surface, which is how it could be identified and recorded at all. The alignment of the burnt stone is telling: it runs parallel to a present-day field boundary to the north-east, and also appears to follow the line of an earlier, since-levelled field boundary beneath it, suggesting the deposit has been shaped or constrained by land divisions that go back some considerable way. Among the finds recovered from the scatter were a sherd of medieval pottery and a fragment of more recent, modern pottery, a reminder that the ground here has seen activity across multiple periods, even if the burnt stone itself belongs to a much earlier phase of use.


