What is recorded here

Half-buried in grass and heather, the fulacht fia at Capnagower still holds heat-cracked stones that once hissed with boiling water. It sits beside a marshy basin and a forgotten enclosure, where people may have cooked, cleaned or gathered before plough ridges cut through the mound. What remains is not a polished monument but a lived edge: water, fire, stone and time twisted together on the north-eastern margin of the land.

Situated c. 20m NW of an enclosure (MA085-054----) on north-eastern side of a marshy basin. The fulacht fia comprises of an oblong grass-covered cairn (N–S 7.5m, E–W 5.7m, H c. 1.6m max. on the southern side) of loose, medium-sized stone, much of it apparently derived from field clearance. However, quite a number of the smaller stones that protrude from its surface display traces of heat fractures. On its north-eastern and north-western sides, the base of the cairn is abutted by broad but short (stunted) tillage ridges that run on a NE–SW axis from the cairn to the edge of the marshy basin. The burnt stone is likely to be derived from a fulacht fia destroyed by the tillage ridges, or part of a fulacht fia mound on to which field clearance has been heaped. The above description is derived from: New Survey of Clare Island. Volume 5: Archaeology. Edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning and John Waddell. (Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. 2007). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated. Date of upload: 29 November 2018

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