The Baltinglass area of south-west Wicklow has the largest concentration of prehistoric hillforts in Ireland. As many as thirteen enclosures of varying design are prominently sited on hills overlooking the modem town. These include some of the most impressive Irish hillforts, the construction of which required coordinated planning and a massive investment of resources. This unique landscape has been the focus of a recent study undertaken by University College Cork. The project combined remote sensing and GIS analysis with conventional archaeological survey and excavation to examine the hillforts in their cultural landscape setting. A palaeoecological study was undertaken at a small bog near Baltinglass to examine the record of human interaction with the local environment over time. For wider context, the Baltinglass sites were also considered in relation to hillfort landscapes in other parts of Ireland and abroad. The results of this study shed new light on an important archaeological landscape in Ireland.

The earliest hilltop enclosures at Baltinglass date back some five and a half thousand years to the first farmers of the Neolithic age. Their settlement can be connected to an impressive passage tomb and to other burial sites of the fourth millennium BC. Somewhat later, large hillforts were built on those same hills during the Middle and Late Bronze Age, c. 1400-800 BC. That was a time of settlement expansion and economic prosperity, when distinct chiefdom societies emerged in different parts of Ireland. Hillforts were central places of those territories, variously used for high-status residence, ceremony and assembly. Their presence in the landscape was also an imposing display of power, at a time of growing militarism and conflict involving rival hillfort groups.