Hilltop enclosure, Rathmoon, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a low hill in the undulating countryside of County Wicklow, there was once a circular earthwork roughly 120 metres across, large enough to enclose several football pitches.
It sat with open views to the south and west, the kind of position that suggests whoever built it wanted either to watch the surrounding land or to be seen upon it. Today, almost nothing of it remains above ground.
The enclosure appears on the 1907 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a clearly defined, approximately circular bank, a form that places it broadly within the tradition of large enclosed sites found across Ireland, which range from ceremonial or assembly sites to early settlement enclosures, though the exact purpose of this one is not recorded. When archaeologists visited in 1989, the western portion of the bank was still legible, sitting at the edge of a pasture field with its earthwork reasonably intact. The eastern section had already been ploughed away under a barley crop. In the years since, the bank has been almost entirely levelled, leaving only a faint scarp along the southern edge as evidence that something once defined this hilltop in a deliberate and substantial way.
The site sits in a quiet part of Wicklow where the land rolls rather than climbs sharply, and the low hill it occupies would have offered a modest but genuine commanding presence over its surroundings. What a visitor finds now is effectively a field, with the southern scarp, a slight step in the ground where the bank once ran, as the only physical trace. It asks something of the imagination, but knowing the scale of what once stood here, 120 metres of continuous earthwork curving around a hilltop, makes that scarp worth pausing over.