Fulacht fia, Baunmore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
In a wet, marshy corner of Baunmore in County Galway, a low mound of scorched stone and earth sits in the kind of ground that would have made it perfectly useful to whoever built it, probably during the Bronze Age.
This is a fulacht fia, one of the most common yet least-celebrated monument types in Ireland. The general theory is that these sites functioned as outdoor cooking places: a trough would be dug into the ground near a water source, filled with water, and then heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it until the water boiled. The mound itself is the accumulated debris of those stones, cracked and blackened from repeated heating and discarding, built up over many uses across what may have been decades or longer.
The Baunmore example is a subcircular mound measuring roughly 10.7 metres northeast to southwest and 8.9 metres northwest to southeast, rising between 0.6 and 1.1 metres above the surrounding ground. It is not in good condition. The trough, which would normally appear as a depression at or near the centre of the mound, is no longer clearly visible, and the most likely explanation is livestock disturbance over time, which has churned and scattered the burnt stone and earth rather than leaving them in their original arrangement. What survives is enough to identify the site, but only just.
