Fulacht fia, Tullerboy, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Tullerboy, Co. Limerick

A Bronze Age cooking site lay completely invisible beneath a flat County Limerick pasture for thousands of years, undetected on historic maps and unrecognisable from the air, until a gas pipeline cut through the ground and exposed it.

That is perhaps the most striking thing about this particular fulacht fia: not what it is, but the sheer completeness of its concealment. A fulacht fia, for the unfamiliar, is a type of prehistoric outdoor cooking place, typically consisting of a water-filled pit and a mound of fire-cracked stone generated by repeatedly heating rocks and dropping them into the water to bring it to a boil. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, mostly as low horseshoe-shaped mounds, but this one left no surface trace at all.

The site sits on flat pasture approximately 585 metres east of Castle Ievers and 235 metres southwest of the townland boundary with Drombeg in Co. Limerick. It came to light in 2002 during construction work for Bord Gáis Éireann's Pipeline to the West, and was one of four prehistoric sites excavated within a 600-metre stretch of the route, later published together by Grogan and colleagues in 2007. Archaeologists working under excavation licence 02E0500 opened an area of 29 square metres and found a disturbed fulacht fia containing two cut pits. The first, a triangular pit roughly 1.5 metres along its longest axis, had a concave centre and shelved edges filled with blue-grey sandy clay, burnt sandstone, and charcoal. The second was oval, steeper-sided, and similarly packed with dark grey clay and fire-cracked stone. A shallow deposit of the same burnt material was also recorded sitting within a natural depression on the site. Two stone tools, a flint crescentic scraper and a chert scraper, were recovered from disturbed surface contexts, and together with the pit fills and overall site character, they point to a Bronze Age date.

The site lies on private farmland and is not accessible to the public in any formal sense; there is nothing to see above ground in any case, since the excavation has long since been backfilled and the pasture returned to agricultural use. Its interest is really documentary rather than visual. Anyone curious about the Pipeline to the West project more broadly can consult the published report by Grogan and colleagues, which brings together the findings from numerous sites uncovered along the same route and offers a broader picture of Bronze Age activity across the Irish midlands and west. The area around Castle Ievers is otherwise quiet agricultural countryside, and the significance of this particular patch of ground would be entirely unguessable to anyone passing by.

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