What is recorded here

Fire struck red sandstone into shards and mixed them with charcoal until the soil turned black beneath Gortatlea. People may have heated water in a wooden trough nearby, then drank, cooked or washed before forgetting the place. What remains is small, yet it preserves the moment when human hands shaped flame into daily life.

'The burnt spread occurred as a loose, black soil with fire-shattered red sandstone and charcoal. It extended along the pipeline corridor for a length of 2.2m north-south and across part of the corridor for a distance of 2.6m east-west. The deposit was a maximum of 0.19m in depth and got gradually more shallow from north to south. The Gortatlea site represents only the barest remains of a probable /fulacht fiadh and therefore it is difficult to make any suggestions as to its size, etc. Yet the composition of the burnt spread and the siting of the find is consistent with sites of this type. A curved, heavy, worked timber recovered 14m from the spread possibly represents the remains of a wooden trough associated with the fulacht fiadh, yet the possibility that it represents something entirely different should not be discounted.' Description from ‘The Prehistoric Settlement of the Lee Valley, Tralee, Co. Kerry; A Landscape Perspective’ by Michael Connolly. PhD Thesis UCC 2008 Date of upload: 29 June 2012

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