What is recorded here

Half a metre of grass hides a bronze-age kitchen where hot stones crashed into water until the trough hissed like a living thing. The locals called it a blacksmith's forge because ploughing tore up cinders and slag, yet the horseshoe shape and sunken basin point to something older: a place where food, drink or perhaps skins were cooked through patient heat. Whoever stood here watched steam rise over the stream below, feeding people or transforming raw material into use. The mound still holds its shape because repetition built it, stone by stone, season after season.

At the bottom of a NE-facing slope in rough pasture, overlooking a stream c. 5m to the N. Recorded by MacMahon (1991, 48) who noted that, according to local information, in the past this monument and similar ones in the locality were known as a ‘cearta [sic] brannach’. The term ‘ceárta’ means forge and whenever such mounds were disturbed by ploughing ‘they were found to contain material similar to the debris sometimes seen around a blacksmith’s fire.’ A classic horseshoe-shaped fulacht fia defined by a grass-covered mound (max. dims. 10.1m NE-SW; 9m NW-SE; H 0.3-0.8m) opening to the NW. The sunken area marks the trough (3.2m NW-SE; 1.6m NE-SW). The following image has been uploaded: CL016-152----_01.jpg View from W Compiled by: Olive Alcock and Lynda McCormack Date of upload: 4 August 2022

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