Fulacht fia, Gleninagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Gleninagh, Co. Clare

On level pastureland a short distance from the Burren coast, a low triangular mound of grass-covered stone sits quietly beside Gleninagh tower house.

It measures roughly 13 metres along its longest axis and rises only 0.8 metres from the ground, the kind of feature that would be easy to walk past without registering its significance. It is a fulacht fia, the remains of a Bronze Age cooking site, where stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. The scorched and shattered stones were raked out after use and gradually accumulated into the horseshoe-shaped or, as here, triangular mounds that survive across the Irish landscape in their thousands.

What makes this particular spot quietly remarkable is not the mound itself but its immediate surroundings. Two further examples lie within roughly 60 metres to the north-west and north-north-east respectively, and between the three, almost equidistant from each, sits a small dilapidated wedge tomb. A wedge tomb is a type of Neolithic or early Bronze Age megalithic burial monument, so named for the tapering plan of its stone chamber, and this one appears to have been placed, or at least survived, at the centre of what amounts to a cluster of prehistoric activity. The proximity of a storm beach to the north adds a further layer of context; coastal locations with ready access to water were precisely the kind of places Bronze Age communities returned to repeatedly, leaving behind these accumulations of fire-cracked stone as the only legible trace of their presence.

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Pete F
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