Fulacht fia, Liscahane, Co. Cork
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Settlement Sites
Beneath a patch of reclaimed land in Liscahane, Co. Cork, lies a prehistoric cooking site that once impressed an observer enough to compare it in scale to a fort.
There is nothing to see now, no mound, no scorched stone, no hollow in the ground, yet local knowledge of its whereabouts has persisted even as the landscape above it changed.
A fulacht fia, in simple terms, is a Bronze Age cooking place, typically identified today by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal left behind after generations of heating water by dropping hot stones into a trough. The Liscahane example was recorded in 1937 by Broker, who noted it on Thomas Barret's land and described it as nearly as big as a fort, a striking detail suggesting the mound was then still substantial and visible. At some point afterwards, land reclamation work altered the ground sufficiently to erase any surface trace, leaving only the name in local memory and a grid reference in the archaeological record.