Fulacht fia, Cecilstown, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Cecilstown, Co. Cork

In a pasture field outside Cecilstown in north Cork, the ground holds what may be one of the more quietly layered prehistoric sites in the county.

A spread of burnt material, reported by locals, marks the probable location of a fulacht fia, an ancient cooking site, typically Bronze Age in origin, where stones were heated in fire and dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The trough itself is usually timber-lined or simply cut into the ground, and the discarded cracked and scorched stones accumulate over time into the horseshoe-shaped mound that survives at many such sites. Here, though, the feature has been levelled, leaving the burnt spread as the main visible trace.

The site sits immediately to the west of an infilled pond and just north of a levelled ringfort, a coincidence of erasure that is not uncommon in agricultural landscapes where successive generations have steadily smoothed the ground. What gives this particular site a small thread of documentary history is a reference from 1934, when a researcher named Bowman recorded a levelled fulacht fiadh on land belonging to a D. Buckley in the same area. The match between that early record and the burnt spread noted here suggests this is the same feature, quietly persisting in the soil across the better part of a century, even as the pond was filled in and the ringfort beside it was reduced to nothing.

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