ECHOES OF ANCIENT IRELAND

There is evidence in our landscape of large ancient cooking pits in which the people of Ireland are thought to have cooked meat.

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They were known as fulacht fiadh.

The cooking pit was made by digging a hole into the earth, which was lined with stone or wood. Our ancestors filled the fulacht fiadh with water from a nearby stream, heated stones in an adjacent fire and rolled them into the trough to heat the water.

They then dropped wrapped meat and other food into the pit to cook it. The advantage of boiling meat rather than roasting it was that the precious fat was also rendered and saved.

We now see evidence of mounds enclosing the trough, often crescent shaped, containing burnt stones shattered by heat, along with dark soil caused by discarded charcoal and ash.

They mostly date to the Bronze Age. Food for ancient Irish feasts was cooked in these pits, but they were also used for brewing, bathing and dyeing.

MILLSTONES

There are remnants of millstone production along our coasts. Sandstone was particularly in demand as it was the best stone for grinding, but resulted in fine grit entering the flour, which wore down tooth surfaces, evidenced by the worn teeth found in skeletal remains.

At these coastal millstone quarries, there was a special method of quarrying the large blocks of stone to keep them in one piece, using the natural resource of the sea.

The men chiselled out a rough disc shape from the cliff, leaving the base attached to the rock, and would then hammer wooden wedges into hollows.