Hilltop enclosure, Constablehill, Co. Carlow
Co. Carlow |
Enclosures
Ordnance Survey mapmakers visited the summit of Constable Hill in County Carlow and recorded a trigonometric station there, marking the spot at 760 feet above sea level.
They noted no enclosure. That omission is quietly telling, because sitting beneath the pasture on that same summit is a roughly circular earthwork some 56 metres in diameter, apparently invisible to surveyors on the ground but legible from above, its outline traced by a fosse, the term for a ditch or trench that would once have defined and defended a boundary.
The enclosure was identified not through excavation or a ground survey but through satellite imagery, spotted and reported by a researcher named Ivor Kenny using Google Earth photographs taken in April and June of 2013. The circular form, typical of a class of enclosed hilltop sites found across Ireland and associated variously with settlement, ritual, or territorial marking, is clearest on the western side. A modern field boundary running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest cuts through the enclosure's eastern portion, blurring its outline on that side. The site does not exist in isolation on the hillside. Approximately 270 metres to the southeast lies a bullaun stone, a large boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface, objects long associated with early Christian and pre-Christian practice in Ireland. Some 540 metres further to the southeast sits a cist, a small stone-lined burial box of a type most commonly associated with Bronze Age interment. The clustering of these features across a relatively compact stretch of Carlow upland suggests that this part of the landscape was meaningful to people over a long span of time, even if the precise nature and date of the hilltop enclosure itself remains unestablished.

