Fulacht fia, Toberroe, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Fulacht fia, Toberroe, Co. Galway

In a low-lying marshy corner of Toberroe in County Galway, a slight grass-covered mound sits in the ground with almost no ceremony.

To the untrained eye it might be dismissed as a natural irregularity in the field, but it is in fact a fulacht fia, the remains of a prehistoric cooking site. These features, found in their thousands across Ireland, typically consist of a horseshoe-shaped mound of shattered, fire-cracked stone built up over generations of use, usually positioned beside a water source or in boggy ground where water was reliably available. The method was simple: stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into a water-filled trough, bringing it to boiling point quickly enough to cook meat. The cracked, spent stones were raked out and discarded, and over time that discard heap became the mound we see today.

Cody's 1989 description records the main mound here as a small oval form, measuring roughly five metres east to west and just over three metres north to south, rising no more than about half a metre at its highest point. At that time two smaller satellite mounds were also noted, one a metre to the north-east and another a metre to the south-west, with a field wall running east to west forming the northern boundary of the grouping. By 1984, however, inspection on the ground found conditions had deteriorated: what remained was a poorly preserved rectangular spread of burnt stone, partially covered by sod, measuring roughly five and a half metres by three metres and reaching a maximum height of about forty centimetres. What makes the Toberroe site particularly interesting is that it does not stand alone. Two further fulachta fia lie within easy proximity, one approximately 110 metres to the north-north-west and another around 50 metres to the north-east, suggesting this wet, marginal landscape was visited and used repeatedly, perhaps by different groups or across different periods, in ways the surviving earthworks alone cannot fully explain.

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Pete F
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