Laghtea Hill-fort and Millenium Cross

Fig.1 Laghtea Hill from the top of Tountinna

The walk out to the the Millenium Cross near Portroe in North Tipperary is probably one of the best kept secrets in the county if not the country. Not only do you get wonderful views over Lough Derg into County Clare but unbeknowst to most people, you also walk through one of Bronze Age Ireland's most interesting and enigmatic monument types, the hill-fort. 

The hill-fort here at Laghtea was only discovered in the 1990s from aerial photographs as it is not immediately obvious from the ground. 

Fig. 2  (Conduit, 1995, 34) with additional highlighting in red

It was described by (Conduit, 1995, 37) as  

"situated c. 10km north-east of Killaloe on the northern foothills of the Arra Mountains around the summit of Laghtea Hill, about 1.6km north of Tountinna, the highest peak in the range. Laghtea Hill itself rises to a height of 1088ft, from where there are extensive views over Lough Derg to the north and west and over the valley of the Nenagh River to the north-east. The ridge of the hill runs in a line roughly north-south with smooth but steep slopes on the west, north and south. The eastern side of the hill is defined by steep cliffs and crags.

The hillfort located in the townlands of Laghtea, Cloneybrien and Townlough Upper, consists of a single enclosing element which is clearly traceable on the north, west and south running along the contour of the hill at about 900ft. The rampart could not be identified on the eastern side of the hill where the hillslope consists of a series of bluffs and crags. There is no evidence to suggest that this side of the hill was ever enclosed. The rampart consists of a double bank with an intervening ditch measuring 7-8m wide. The ditch, c. 2.5m wide at the bottom, is grass covered. The outer bank stands c. 0.5 m high from the bottom of the ditch and is c. 2m wide at the base. The inner bank, on average c. 2.5m wide, stands up to c. 2.5m high from the bottom of the ditch and c. 0.7m above the inside. For the most part the entire rampart is covered by peat and furze, while the ditch, which was dry at the time of inspection, was visible as a grassy track running through the furze. Where the hillfort rampart returns eastwards at the north end of the hillfort the possible remains of a circular platform (c 20m diam.) can be traced. The presence of this enclosure is detectable under more verdant furze growth. Within this there is evidence for the existence of a well with stone surrounding its edge. It is difficult to establish the exact relationship of this circular platform with the hillfort enclosure but it would appear to be at least contiguous with the hillfort rampart."

Fig. 3 Extent of Laghtea hill-fort (Image copyright NMS) with additional highlighting in blue

The likely translation of the placename Laghtea is Leacht Aodha or grave or burial of Aodha / Hugh. Who this person was is not recorded but you would wonder if it was any reference to the circular platform mentioned in the archaeological description above. .

Other monuments in the vicinity of the hill-fort that could be of a similar age are The Graves of the Leinstermen (possibly the remains of a court-tomb) and The Capstone of the King of Leinster which could be the remains of a cairn of some kind. 

Another interesting monument on the slope of Laghtea hill-fort is St. Patrick's Stone which has some great folklore associated with it. 

Also somewhere in the vicinity is Fert Fintan which is thought to have been located on the nearby Tountinna. 

A concrete cross was built on the summit of Laghtea hill in the 1930s and a few years later it was hit by lightning and fell. For the Millenium in the year 2000 a new mental cross was built and a track-way was created out to this new cross. Despite all this work there have been no reports to my knowledge of any finds from the hill other than at The Capstone of the King of Leinster and this dates back to the 1800s.

Fig 4. Laghtea hill from the car-park at the Graves of the Leinstermen

So what exactly is a hill-fort?   

The old view on hill-forts was that they were;

"used as a fortified refuge or defended settlement, located to exploit a rise in elevation for defensive advantage. They are typically European and of the Bronze and Iron Ages."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillfort

However the narrative around hill-forts has changed and certainly a one size sits all approach doesn't seem to be applicable now. Recently they have been linked with the major change in society during the Bronze Age, namely the creation of metals.

In the Neolithic there may have been perhaps a class of people that were involved in rituals surrounding burials and megalithic tombs. However they do not appear to have achieved a higher economic or material status than the average Neolithic person.

This you could argue changes with the introduction of metal-working in the Bronze Age. It may have helped with specialisation. An example of this is the creation of a class of artisans and also other workers in the extraction of raw materials for the production of metal. These raw materials (necessary for the production of metal) were generally not all located in the same region and so sea-faring traders also arose to facilitate the supply of these. Lastly it could be argued that it also helped create a warrior elite. 

A paper from 2015 called “The Political Economy and Metal Trade in Bronze Age Europe: Understanding Regional Variability in Terms of Comparative Advantages & Articulations” suggests that regional advantages, in terms of the types of metals that are geologically in a given location and then the bottlenecks in transporting that metal or finished metal product, allowed this new class system to emerge.

For example in Ireland there seems to have been sufficient indigenous copper for the production of bronze but a scarcity of tin. Therefore whoever controlled the trade of tin into Ireland could create wealth disproportionate to its actual worth. Simply put whoever had access to ships or marine skills may have been able to bring tin over to Ireland and create a monopoly. 

This creation of wealth then allowed them to employ (or become patrons to) artisans to make the large variety of bronze items such as swords, axes, shields, jewellert and tools found in Ireland and also Europe from Irish sources. This it could be argued allowed these trading elites to attain more wealth as they now had a monopoly on “violence” (producing the weapons). 

The paper also talks of other bottlenecks that could be manufactured in regions such as the control of waterways or ports. The simple physical control of routeways, again by the treat of physical violence through having a well armed warrior elite, could create such a bottle-neck. Even areas that did not have natural metal resources began to exhibit similar structures as larger scale exploitation of local resources such as fur or amber in Scandinavia in an effort to attain these metals by trade.

This increased wealth and creation of leaders seems to have led to physically different settlements in Ireland – namely hill-forts. These hill-forts may often have controlled one of these bottlenecks. 

This is where we get back to Laghtea hill. It has commanding views of the River Shannon and particularly the sheltered Youghal Bay and may have helped create a bottleneck here where raiding / taxing of boats took place. From here there are three hill-forts that may possibly control the west to east trade through the Slieve Felim mountains (from the Shannon), so it is interesting to test the hypothesis in a local context. These hill-forts are thought to have been lived in or at least owned by the warrior elite. 
What is also interesting is that the Laghtea / Cloneybrien area remained associated with mining right up to the present day with the slate quarries. 
There has been suggestions that other forms of mining took place in the vicinity and also nearby at the Silvermines with "old-men workings" being found at both.. 

References 
Condit, T. (1995). Hillfort Discoveries near Killaloe, Co. Clare. Archaeology Ireland, 9(1), 34-37. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20562176

Timothy Earle, Johan Ling, Claes Uhnér, Zofia Stos-Gale & Lene Melheim (2015) The Political Economy and Metal Trade in Bronze Age Europe: Understanding Regional Variability in Terms of Comparative Advantages and Articulations, European Journal of Archaeology, 18:4, 633-657, DOI: 10.1179/1461957115Y.0000000008