Fulacht fia, Garries, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a peaty east-facing slope in the hill pasture above the Flesk River valley in County Kerry, a low horseshoe of burnt earth and stone curves quietly into the landscape.
It measures roughly eleven metres east to west and just over seven metres north to south, rising to about a metre in height, with a westward-facing opening a little over two metres wide. A stream runs along the eastern arc of the mound, which is partly exposed at the south-west and at its base. There is no signpost, no enclosure, no marker of significance. It sits in a sheltered hollow as it has sat, more or less, for several thousand years.
This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found in great numbers across Ireland, most commonly dating from the Bronze Age. The typical arrangement involved heating stones in a fire, dropping them into a water-filled trough until the water boiled, and using the resulting heat to cook meat or process other materials. The crescent or horseshoe-shaped mound that remains is the accumulated debris of those heated and shattered stones, which crack and fragment when quenched repeatedly and become useless for further heating. The presence of a stream so close to this example at Garries is consistent with the pattern seen at fulachta fia across the country; access to running water was a practical necessity for the process. The sheltered hollow on the valley slope would have offered some protection from wind, and the east-facing aspect would have caught the morning light, though whether such details were deliberate choices or simply convenient is impossible to say at this distance.