Mound, Rossalia, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A small mound in Rossalia, Co. Clare spent several decades classified as something it almost certainly is not.
Roughly two metres across and no more than thirty centimetres high, the feature was logged in official records as a fulacht fiadh, the term used for a Bronze Age burnt mound, typically the debris left behind by an ancient outdoor cooking site where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The classification persisted through two rounds of national record-keeping before anyone took a closer look.
The confusion appears to have originated with a 1995 publication by Coffey, which noted that a local memorial to the Comyn family stood on what was described as a fulacht fia. That description was carried into the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and repeated in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. When the site was physically inspected in 1997, the reality was more modest: a low, unremarkable mound with no trace of the burnt stone spread, charcoal-stained soil, or waterlogged hollow that would be expected at a genuine Bronze Age cooking site. The fulacht fiadh classification was effectively unsupported. What remained was the Comyn memorial itself, a named local monument, sitting on a small earthen rise of uncertain origin and no confirmed prehistoric significance.
The episode is a quiet illustration of how errors can accumulate through successive administrative cycles. A single published reference, not independently verified, was absorbed into two separate official inventories over several years before a site visit resolved the matter. The mound is still there; it simply is not what the paperwork said it was for the better part of a decade.