Fulacht fia, Dawstown, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
In a field at Dawstown, Co. Cork, a Bronze Age cooking site has all but ceased to exist.
There is nothing to see. The ground has been turned over for crops, the mound is gone, and the only record of its physical presence on the landscape is a mark on an Ordnance Survey map made in 1937.
What that map recorded was a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically beside a water source. The standard interpretation is that stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil, leaving behind a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked and burnt stone. They cluster near streams and boggy ground, which is exactly the setting described here, on the southern bank of a stream. By the time the site was formally recorded, it was already a mound rather than a legible structure. Since then, agricultural tillage has removed even that.


