Burnt mound, Rathcash, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Burnt mound, Rathcash, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath the pasture and reclaimed marsh of Rathcash, Co. Kilkenny, lies the fragmentary evidence of a prehistoric cooking tradition that was once common across the Irish landscape, yet is still not fully understood.

What survives here are the darkened remnants of fulachta fiadha, ancient outdoor cooking sites typically associated with the Bronze Age, reduced by centuries of ploughing to roughly circular spreads of burnt stone and charcoal.

The sites came to light in 1983 during fieldwalking carried out ahead of the laying of the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline, a form of archaeological survey in which teams walk systematically across the ground looking for surface finds and anomalies before construction disturbs the soil. O'Flaherty recorded that seven fulachta fiadha had been discovered across the townlands of Clohoge and Rathcash, all of them already ploughed out and without any visible troughs. A fulacht fiadh typically consists of a mound of heat-shattered stone surrounding a trough, usually timber-lined or rock-cut, which was filled with water and heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The absence of troughs here led to the sites being reclassified as burnt mounds rather than fulachta fiadha in the strict sense. Five of the seven monuments were mapped, a sixth was excavated because it lay directly within the pipeline corridor, and the location of the seventh remains unknown, its precise position within the two townlands unestablished.

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