Fulacht fia, Meentyflugh, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Meentyflugh, Co. Cork

In a field in the townland of Meentyflugh in north Cork, close to a small stream, there is a low mound of burnt material that most walkers would step over without a second thought.

Measuring roughly nine and a half metres from north to south and six and a half metres from east to west, with a drain running along its eastern edge, it sits in ordinary pasture and registers as little more than a slight rise in the ground. What it actually represents is something far older and more curious: a fulacht fia, the remains of a prehistoric cooking site. The typical fulacht fia consists of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, the debris from a process in which stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough to bring it to the boil. Thousands of these sites survive across Ireland, nearly always near water, and the one at Meentyflugh is a quiet, barely legible example of that widespread but still not fully understood tradition.

The site may have been one of four fulachta fiadh identified in the Meentyflugh townland and recorded by a researcher named Bowman in 1934. According to that record, the sites were distributed across the lands of three local families: one on M. Casey's land, one on M. McCarthy's land, and two on D. Healy's land. Whether the Meentyflugh example corresponds to one of those four, or represents a fifth and separate feature, is not certain. What the clustering of multiple sites within a single townland does suggest is that this corner of north Cork saw repeated, perhaps seasonal, use over a long period, with different locations chosen along the same watercourses or on the same wet, low-lying ground that made such cooking methods practical.

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Pete F
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