Fulacht fia, Fallakeeran, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Fallakeeran, Co. Mayo

Beneath the flat, reclaimed pastureland of Fallakeeran, Co. Mayo, a prehistoric cooking place lay hidden for roughly four and a half thousand years, until a water supply scheme brought it briefly back into the light.

A fulacht fia is a type of ancient burnt mound, found in considerable numbers across Ireland, and typically interpreted as an outdoor cooking site where water in a trough was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into it. The stones, once shattered and spent, were piled beside the trough, forming the low mounds that survive today. What makes the Fallakeeran example quietly interesting is not any particular grandeur but the small, precise details that excavation managed to recover before the site disappeared again into the landscape.

The mound itself was modest: roughly three and a half metres by five metres, no more than forty centimetres high, built from burnt sandstone in a charcoal-rich matrix and sitting on an older layer of peat. Beneath it lay a possible trough, a subcircular cut about a metre across with a shallow concave profile. A second possible trough, with steeper sides and a flat base, was found seven metres to the south-east under a separate deposit of burnt stone, though a modern water pipe had clipped its edge. Alongside these features, excavators recovered eight flint flakes and blades, a chert core-scraper, and three fragments of animal bone, two from cattle and one possibly from pig. Radiocarbon dating of a charcoal sample placed the site's activity between approximately 2500 and 2280 BC, spanning the transition from the Late Neolithic into the Early Bronze Age. The site had been heavily disturbed before excavation, and a second fulacht fia lies about 150 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of Mayo saw repeated, perhaps routine, use over time. The excavation was carried out between 2001 and 2002 as part of archaeological monitoring for the Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme, and the findings were published by Guinan in 2015.

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