Fulacht fia, Carrigacooleen, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Carrigacooleen, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at this particular spot in Carrigacooleen, and that, in a quiet way, is part of what makes it worth knowing about.

Somewhere in a pasture field along the northern edge of a stream, beneath ordinary grass, lies what is believed to be a fulacht fia, one of the thousands of prehistoric cooking sites scattered across the Irish countryside. A fulacht fia typically consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones, accumulated over repeated use: stones would be heated in a fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, most likely for cooking meat. The mounds are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, and yet individually they tend to go unnoticed, absorbed back into the land.

This site entered the record by a particular route. A researcher named Broker noted a fulacht fiadh in 1937, locating it on the farm of a man called John Moriarty. Local information has since confirmed the presence of burnt material in the same general area, which is consistent with the fire-cracked stone deposits that define these sites. Whether the 1937 observation and the current location refer to exactly the same spot is not entirely certain, but the two accounts point in the same direction. There is no visible surface trace remaining today, the mound having either spread flat over time or been disturbed by agricultural activity, as happens frequently with low-lying earthworks in continuously farmed landscapes.

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