Locations
The vast majority of burnt mounds are found in the uplands of Britain, and in Ireland where they are called fulachtaí fia. Recognised from the nineteenth century onwards, they attracted little significant interest until the 1980s. In Ireland they are often found in low-lying ground close to water. In Britain, they appeared to have a distribution pattern confined to the higher ground. However, this may be illusory, as examples have been found at lower altitudes during linear route excavations. The reason that they had not been recognised previously was that the mounds have been ploughed out, although the trough may partially survive and there will be layers of the burnt mound material surviving as a spread of material. The mixture of burnt and shattered rock with charcoal, labelled as burnt mound material, is found on occasion without the trough. There are settlement sites on Orkney, where the burnt mound material is found as thick layers, but there is no trough to explain the shattering of the rocks.
The upland bias in distribution in Britain has led to a suggestion that they were cooking sites for hunting parties, and there are images from Medieval Irish texts that appear to show this. There are also descriptions of the use of such features for cooking in some of the early Medieval tales, although the historicity of these accounts is open to question. The burnt mounds are always adjacent to water courses, and there can be several instances along the same burn or stream.
There has been considerable debate about the time required to create the mounds. Some interpretations posit the rapid accumulation of material, as a trough was used intensively and very frequently; others suggest a slower accumulation, where the trough was used occasionally over a long period of time. The hunting site explanation would most likely result in the latter pattern of accumulation, while the former would suggest that the use of the trough was for an essentially domestic purpose.
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