Bronze Age · c. 1200–400 BC · Brusselstown Ring, County Wicklow, Ireland
Bronze Age hillfort in Ireland had more than 600 house platforms, study finds
Surveys and test excavations at Brusselstown Ring in County Wicklow point to a densely packed community occupied from around 1200 BC into the Early Iron Age.
Peer-reviewed paper
Brusselstown Ring, Ireland A hillfort in County Wicklow, in eastern Ireland, contained evidence for more than 600 houses, making it the largest nucleated settlement yet identified in prehistoric Britain or Ireland, according to a study published in Antiquity. Radiocarbon dates and finds from Brusselstown Ring suggest that it was occupied mainly between about 1200 and 400 BC, from the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age.
A nucleated settlement is one where houses are clustered together rather than scattered across the countryside as separate farms. Most known settlement in prehistoric Ireland takes the scattered form: isolated farmsteads and small hamlets. Larger villages were already known, such as the Bronze Age village at Corrstown found in 2002. Until now the largest comparable cluster in Ireland was at Mullaghfarna in County Sligo, where around 150 structures have been recorded.
The project is led by Dirk Brandherm of Queen's University Belfast. His co-authors on the paper are C. Edwards, L. Boutoille and J. O'Driscoll.
Two ramparts across two hills
Brusselstown Ring is one of up to 13 large hilltop enclosures in the Baltinglass hillfort cluster, an area with almost continuous activity from the Early Neolithic through the Bronze Age. Two widely spaced ramparts surround the site. The outer one takes in both the main hillfort and the neighbouring Spinas Hill, including an older Neolithic enclosure known as Spinas Hill 1. Enclosures that span more than one hill are rare in Ireland and Britain and very uncommon even in later Iron Age Europe.
Airborne and topographical surveys picked out more than 600 faint platforms, which the team interprets as the foundations of roundhouses. Ninety-eight lie inside the inner enclosure and more than 500 sit in the ground between the inner and outer ramparts.
This isn't simply a village. The number of domestic structures suggests an organised community on a scale that begins to resemble a proto-town.
Dirk Brandherm, Queen's University Belfast, quoted by Arkeonews
Ireland's first towns are usually credited to Viking settlers of the 9th and 10th centuries, at places such as Dublin, Waterford and Limerick. The research team says the word "town" has to be used cautiously for a prehistoric site, but that Brusselstown shows concentrated communal living and coordinated construction.
Houses of different sizes, used at the same time
To test the survey results, the team dug four trenches in 2024 across house platforms of different sizes. The dwellings ranged from about four metres to as much as twelve metres in diameter. According to Archaeology News, houses of different diameters were in use at the same time, and the artefacts found in them showed no clear differences in wealth or status. Archaeology News reports this as a sign of a relatively egalitarian community, while Arkeonews describes the evidence on social ranking as still inconclusive.
Near one trench the excavators found a stone-lined structure with a flat interior beside a natural water source. Its form makes it unlikely to be an ordinary roundhouse, and the team thinks it may have been a cistern fed by an upland spring. Similar structures are known from parts of continental Europe, including France and Spain, but none has been recorded in an Irish hillfort. If radiocarbon dating places it in the same period as the houses, it would point to considerable planning to supply water to a large population on the hilltop.
The settlement appears to have been abandoned gradually during the 3rd century BC, as were other, smaller hilltop settlements in Ireland. The decline does not seem to be directly connected to climate change, and Archaeology News suggests that social and economic factors played a larger part.
The team's next steps are to confirm what the possible cistern was used for, refine the dating of the ramparts, and study how the roundhouses were built and how long they stood.
Sources
- Scientists uncover Ireland’s largest prehistoric hillfort settlement, reshaping views of Bronze Age society (Archaeology News)
- Newly Uncovered Bronze Age Megasettlement in Wicklow Challenges Long-Held Beliefs About Ireland’s First Towns (Arkeonews)
Paper: Brandherm, D., Edwards, C., Boutoille, L. & O'Driscoll, J. (2025). Brusselstown Ring: a nucleated settlement agglomeration in prehistoric Ireland. Antiquity, 1–8. doi:10.15184/aqy.2025.10247
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