Fulacht fia, Mogouhy, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Mogouhy, Co. Clare

A low, horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt stone and ash sits on elevated ground in County Clare, its open end facing the north-north-west across rough limestone pasture.

This is a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stone accumulated beside a water trough, where stones were heated and dropped into water to boil or steam food. Most examples date to the Bronze Age, though the type persisted across several periods. What makes the Mogouhy example quietly complicated is that it has not sat undisturbed: a later cairn of unburnt limestone has been piled across much of its southern side, partly obscuring and partly merging with the original structure, so that the two phases of activity now exist in awkward, overlapping conversation.

The fulacht fia measures roughly 13.5 metres north to south and 8.4 metres across, rising between 0.6 and 1.05 metres in height. Where the later limestone cairn encroaches on the western side, burnt stone from the original mound is still traceable beneath it for about 4.5 metres, confirming that the earlier feature extends underneath. The site sits within an extensive multiperiod field system, suggesting that this particular patch of semi-karst ground was used and reused across a long span of time by people farming or moving through the landscape. Adding a further layer of strangeness to the setting, a disused mineshaft lies immediately to the west, marked on both the 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan and the 1920 edition of the six-inch map. About 110 metres to the south, a separate enclosure adds to the sense of a place that accumulated human activity across many centuries without ever quite being tidied into a single, legible story.

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Pete F
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