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RATHGALL HILLFORT & AGHOWLE CHURCH
Aghowle Church
St. Finnian established a religious community at Aghowle
(field of the apple trees) early in the 6th Century. He
erected a ‘Teampall Mór’ or big Church as he had a large
number of monks living in Aghowle.
They lived in beehive cells, built around a wooden
Church. St Finnian continued to live in Aghowle for 16
years. Around 1100AD the wooden Church was replaced with
the present stone structure. Some of the most imposing Iron Age
monuments in County Wicklow are the Hill-forts, where a
large stone wall with a ditch surrounds an area covering
many acres of a hill-top, such as at Rathgall.
Rathgall Hillfort
Rathgall is a multivallate hillfort, on the edge of a
ridge with four concentric stone walls and extensive
panoramic views. It is an imposing monument covering a
total area of 7.5ha (18 acres), with
the inner circle measuring 15 metres wide. Excavations,
started in 1969 (Raftery), revealed important evidence
for Late Bronze Age activity at Rathgall, dating to
800BC. Evidence of a house was discovered in the inner
stone circle with the second and third ramparts forming
the main defensive walls.
Extensive metal workshop areas were uncovered in the
inner and outer circles for casting large quantities of
bronze weapons and tools. Other finds included glass,
bronze and stone objects, clay moulds, gold and glass
beads and other artefacts. It is clear from the
excavations that an important wealthy family or small
community lived on the hilltop.
Rathgall was a site of quite
exceptional importance in the centuries spanning the
birth of Christ, an importance that was clearly
pan-European. The variety of structural information that
the excavation yielded is unprecedented in the Bronze
Age and the extraordinary concentration of artifactual
evidence from the site has not been matched elsewhere in
the country. Rathgall opens a wide range of questions
concerning, not merely the nature of the Ireland’s later
Bronze Age, but also the role of the hillfort
incontemporary cultural developments.
Prof. Barry Raftery 2004
This fine hillfort is situated near Shillelagh - Tullow
road, about 6 km east of Tullow
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