Definitions

Enclosure fortification

Defended enclosures with no lord and often no permanent residence — hillforts, ringforts, raths, cashels, brochs, promontory forts. The band that turns Ireland from a 4,552-castle country into a 31,431-site one.

Criterion

An enclosed site whose bank, ditch, rampart or wall was built to defend or command the enclosed area, where the enclosure is the primary work and no single lordly residence defines it. Predominantly prehistoric and early-medieval. Excluded where the enclosure is agricultural, ritual or merely boundary-marking with no defensive intent.

Includes

• Hillforts, promontory forts, multivallate enclosures
• Irish ringforts: raths, cashels, and related enclosed settlement
• Brochs, duns, and crannógs where defensively sited
• Ringworks lacking an identified lordly residence

Excludes

• Enclosures of purely agricultural or ritual function
• Any site with an identified lordly residence — that is fortified_residence
• Post-medieval state works — that is state_fortification

Closure: enumerable

Strongly closable where a national survey exists, and the numbers are large: 31,431 ringfort-class records in the Irish SMR, 4,147 in the Atlas of Hillforts across Britain and Ireland. Closure fails wherever no national survey has been done, which is most of the world.

Who defines it this way

• Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland — University of Edinburgh / University of Oxford / University College Cork, AHRC-funded; 4,147 entries at 2017 launch (source)

  Many hillforts are not on hills and are not really forts.

• Archaeological Survey of Ireland (National Monuments Service) — Sites and Monuments Record, monument classes Ringfort — rath / cashel / unclassified (source)

Bounded by

• Sites and Monuments Record — Archaeological Survey of Ireland — National Monuments Service, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage · 4552 matching entries
• Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland — University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford and University College Cork (AHRC-funded) · 4147 matching entries
• Cof Cymru — National Historic Assets of Wales — Cadw (Welsh Government) · 104 matching entries

In this dataset

Derived from the records, not typed. See counts and coverage.

Note

This band is a European instrument and shows its limits fastest outside Europe. Māori pā are hilltop fortifications built in the thousands with timber palisades rather than stone, because metal tools were unavailable — a whole fortification tradition invisible to any definition that reaches for masonry, and one this dataset does not yet hold a single record for. Recorded here so the omission is a stated gap rather than an implied absence.

Assessed records

Structures somebody applied this criterion to, with the reasoning.

• Dún Aonghasa — yes: A prehistoric multivallate promontory fort of concentric drystone enclosures on a cliff edge, with a chevaux-de-frise of set stones. The enclosure is the primary work and no lordly residence defines it.
• Chittorgarh Fort — yes: A hill fort in the Arthashastra giridurga sense - terrain-defined fortification enclosing and commanding a large area, with the enclosure as the primary work.

Definition file · dataset licensed CC BY 4.0