Fulacht fia, Ballynabarny, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Ballynabarny, Co. Wicklow

At Ballynabarny in County Wicklow, excavation work uncovered one of those quietly ordinary, yet oddly compelling, features of the Irish Bronze Age landscape: a fulacht fia.

The term refers to a cooking site, typically comprising a trough filled with water, a nearby hearth for heating stones, and a surrounding mound of discarded burnt and shattered rock that accumulated over repeated use. They are found in their thousands across Ireland, usually in low-lying or marshy ground, and their very commonness is part of what makes any individual example worth pausing over.

The excavation, carried out by Audrey Gahan under licence reference 02E0856, revealed a trough measuring roughly 1.84 metres east to west and 1.8 metres wide, with a depth of around 0.45 metres. Within it were layers of burnt mound material, the characteristic debris left when fire-heated stones were plunged into water to bring it to a boil. A hearth was identified approximately 20 metres to the north-west, which would have served as the stone-heating station. Scattered across the surrounding area were a series of pits and post-holes, arranged without any obvious pattern, suggesting additional activity at the site whose precise nature remains open to interpretation. The findings were published in Bennett's 2004 excavation bulletin.

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