Fulacht fia, Kiltacky More, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Kiltacky More, Co. Clare

In a low-lying pasture in County Clare, a broad horseshoe of grass-covered stones quietly marks the spot where Bronze Age people once boiled water on an industrial scale.

The feature is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found in great numbers across Ireland, typically identified by its characteristic crescent-shaped mound of fire-cracked and heat-shattered stones surrounding a central trough. This particular example sits at the southern end of a shallow basin that old Ordnance Survey mapping annotated as "Liable to Floods", which is no accident: fulachtaí fia were almost always placed near reliable sources of water, and a naturally flood-prone hollow would have suited the purpose well.

The site was first described by Martin Ryan in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal in 1966 to 1967, under the heading of fulachtaí fiadha near Killanaboy, and later reported to the National Monuments Service in 1996 by Tom Coffey. It is a substantial monument. The horseshoe-shaped bank measures 16.4 metres across in both axes, with the spread of burnt stone running between 5.9 and 7.8 metres in width. The bank stands higher on its southeastern side and opens to the southwest, where a large boulder is embedded in the surviving edge. At the centre lies an oval trough area measuring 8.7 metres by 2.1 metres, which extends out toward that same southwestern opening. A small rectangular section of the bank on the south-southeast side has been dug into at some point, and a channel roughly 2.5 metres long connects this disturbance to the central trough, possibly a later intervention or an original feature related to water management. Roughly 186 metres to the north-northeast, a holy well occupies the same quiet landscape, a reminder that watery, marginal places in Ireland accumulated significance across many different periods and traditions.

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