Fulacht fia, Curraglass, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Curraglass, Co. Kerry

In a rough Kerry pasture, a low horseshoe of scorched and fire-cracked stone sits quietly in the slope, eroded on one side where sheep have been trampling across it to reach their feeding-troughs.

That small indignity is telling: this is not a monument in any managed or fenced sense, but an ancient feature absorbed into working farmland, as ordinary to the surrounding landscape as the mature tree growing beside it and the farm road running past its eastern edge.

A fulacht fia, broadly speaking, is a Bronze Age cooking site. The typical arrangement involves a trough, usually timber-lined or stone-lined and filled with water, into which heated stones were dropped to bring the water to a boil. Over repeated use, those stones shattered, and the accumulated debris of cracked, blackened rock was raked out and piled around the trough, forming the characteristic horseshoe or crescent shape that survives as a low mound. At Curraglass, that mound measures roughly 19.5 metres north to south and about 17 metres east to west, rising to a modest half-metre in height. The opening of the horseshoe, measuring just over four metres across, faces west, towards a stream that runs approximately ten metres away, which would have served as the water source for the whole operation. What is particularly notable here is that a second fulacht fia lies just 5.4 metres to the north, the two sites sitting in unusually close proximity on the same slope.

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Pete F
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