Page 42 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

COUNTY WICKLOW'S 'HIDDEN' HERITAGE PARK

2,000-500 BC. They consisted of a pit lined with wood, stone
slabs or just non-porous clay. This was then filled with water.
Close by, stones were heated in a fire, and then rolled into the
pit to heat the water. Meat from hunting parties was wrapped in
straw and cooked in the boiling water. The burnt stones were
then thrown out to form a horseshoe around the pit. It is these
burnt stone mounds which today leave their mark on the
landscape.

Although this is the generally-accepted use of the Fulacht
Fiadh, it is significant that no bones have been found around
these ‘cooking places’, as one would expect. It is my opinion that
they were used to generate steam for some religious or tribal
ritual as yet unknown. Some have post-holes around them,
suggesting the retention of the steam. Some even suggest they
were the first sauna baths!

Walking on from here over long-forgotten cultivated ridges,
we soon come to the most remarkable monument on the
Common, a Bowl Barrow, also dating from the Bronze Age. It is
a large mound like an inverted bowl, under which was buried
single or multiple cremated human remains. The remains were
placed in an urn, and nearby personal belongings and a bowl for
food for the journey into the afterlife were also included. This
Barrow is surrounded by a fosse and an external ditch and is
approximately 25m in diameter. Close by, and from the more
recent years of the eighteenth century, can be identified three
rectangular houses surrounded by small garden-like enclosures.

Within 200m of the Bowl Barrow is the last of the ringforts
with its hut site that we visited before joining the lane that leads
back onto the main road. Along the lane we cross a tributary of
the Dargle which flows north to Bray, and across the main road
is a tributary of the Vartry which flows south to Wicklow. In
primitive parts of the world water flowing out of a mountain gave
38