Fulacht fia, Ballykerwick, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Ballykerwick, Co. Cork

In the townland of Ballykerwick in mid Cork, a prehistoric cooking site once occupied a modest but measurable patch of ground, roughly 39 feet by 30 feet, with its characteristic trough-opening facing north.

Today it is gone, levelled and cut through by a drainage channel, surviving only in an observation made decades before it disappeared entirely.

A fulacht fia, to give the feature its Irish name, is a type of ancient outdoor cooking place found in enormous numbers across Ireland, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone surrounding a timber-lined pit or trough. Water was boiled by dropping heated stones into the trough, which could then be used to cook meat or serve other purposes; theories about their precise function continue to be debated. The Ballykerwick example was recorded by Hartnett in 1939, who noted its dimensions and the orientation of its opening. That record, brief as it is, became the primary evidence of the site's existence, since the monument itself did not survive to be examined again in any meaningful way.

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