Fulacht fia, Dooradoyle, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Dooradoyle, Co. Limerick

Beneath what had long served as a rugby pitch in Dooradoyle, on the southern fringes of Limerick city, lay the compressed and blackened remains of a prehistoric cooking site, flattened by generations of scraping and levelling, and only revealed when construction work on the N20/21 road improvement scheme prompted an archaeological investigation.

The site is a fulacht fia, a type of Bronze Age cooking monument found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked and discarded stones alongside a water-filled trough into which heated stones were dropped to boil the water. What made this particular example quietly striking was not its preservation, which was poor, but what survived despite the damage: two kidney-shaped arms of blackened, heat-shattered stone, oriented roughly north to south, enclosing a clay-lined trough at their centre.

Archaeological material was first identified in 1997 during topsoil stripping monitored by Audrey Gahan under Licence No. 97E0289. Subsequent excavation that same year, carried out by Cia McConway under an extension to the same licence, established the fuller picture. The western arm of the burnt mound measured 14.5 metres by 7 metres, though only 0.15 metres deep, while the eastern arm, at 22.5 metres by 9 metres and 0.5 metres deep, had been compressed into the soft natural clay beneath. The central trough, measuring 2.58 metres by 2 metres and 0.54 metres deep, was clay-lined and cut through the subsoil; a shallower basin feature sat along its western edge. A second, unlined trough to the east of the mound, measuring 1.96 metres by 1.42 metres, had a post-hole at each corner, suggesting it once held a small wooden frame, probably a spit. Stake-holes clustered around its eastern edge may have supported a windbreak. Both troughs were filled with a black, greasy clay packed with heat-shattered stone. A related enclosure lies approximately 55 metres to the west, and a further fulacht fia approximately 45 metres to the north, suggesting this was once a more extensively used part of the landscape.

The site no longer has a visible surface presence; it was excavated ahead of road construction and is not accessible as a monument in the conventional sense. Its interest lies in what the excavation records, compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the Irish monuments database in June 2020, reveal about the density of prehistoric activity in an area now given over to suburbs and road infrastructure. Anyone interested in Bronze Age archaeology in the wider Limerick region would find the excavations.ie record, catalogued under the 1997 season, worth reading alongside the monument entries for the associated enclosure and northern fulacht fia.

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