Fulacht fia, Lackaroe, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Lackaroe, Co. Cork

Three of them survive within roughly 140 metres of one another at Lackaroe in north Cork, sitting in rough grazing land close to a stream, which is exactly where you would expect to find them.

A fulacht fia is a Bronze Age cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charred material built up over centuries of use around a central trough. The idea was straightforward: heat stones in a fire, drop them into a water-filled pit, and bring the water to a boil fast enough to cook meat. The discarded, shattered stones accumulated into the characteristic mound that survives long after everything else has gone.

The largest of the three at Lackaroe measures 20 metres long and 18 metres wide, rising to about 0.8 metres at its highest point on the eastern side. At its centre is a depression roughly 8 metres across and 0.8 metres deep, with a narrow opening facing south, and within that depression are two further shallow irregular hollows, possibly the remains of the cooking troughs themselves. The proximity of the site to a stream, approximately 25 metres to the northwest, is entirely consistent with how these monuments work across Ireland; access to water was not incidental but essential. What is slightly less ordinary here is the clustering. A second fulacht fia lies around 60 metres to the east-southeast, and a third about 140 metres to the northeast, suggesting this low, wet ground near Lackaroe was returned to repeatedly, perhaps across generations, as a place suited to communal or large-scale food preparation during the Bronze Age.

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