Mound, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Galway

A low, grass-covered mound sitting in the south-east corner of a rocky field on the western side of one of the Aran Islands sounds, on the face of it, unremarkable.

What makes this particular mound worth attention is the question hanging over it: nobody is entirely sure what it is. It measures roughly eight metres north to south and six metres east to west, rising to a modest height of about 0.8 metres, and it curves gently from south through west to north. Just beyond the field wall to the east, a spring well feeds the ground. That proximity is suggestive.

The site only came to light between 2014 and 2018, during fieldwork carried out as part of the AranLIFE Farming Project, a scheme focused on sustainable agriculture across the Aran Islands. The spring well nearby raised the possibility that the mound might be a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically Bronze Age in date, where stones were heated in a fire and dropped into a water trough to bring it to the boil. These monuments are extremely common across Ireland, and their characteristic signature is a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked, burnt stone built up around the trough over repeated use. Here, though, no burnt stone was observed around the mound, which leaves the fulacht fiadh interpretation unconfirmed and the structure's true nature open. It may be something else entirely, or it may simply be a fulacht fiadh from which the diagnostic burnt stone has been removed or buried out of sight. The curved profile of the mound does loosely echo the classic horseshoe shape of that monument type, which is what prompted the comparison in the first place.

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