Flight displays at Woodlands Falconry
Destination shopping and activity centre Rathwood, in the Wicklow/Carlow border, will be for the first time running guided tours to Rathgall Hillfort in Coolkenno as part of the activities taking part around the county for Heritage Week.
Running during Heritage Week, from Saturday 20th August to Sunday 28th August, a shuttle bus will depart from Rathwood Home and Garden Centre at 2pm and 3pm for the hour-long guided tour. Patrick Doyle from Carlow Tours will be guiding the groups.
“We are proud of being part of Heritage Week this year and offering people from across the country the opportunity to visit this site guided by an expert in the field,” explains James Keogh, director at Rathwood.
Excavations on the site started in 1969 with Professor Barry Raftery, from UCD, revealing evidence of Late Bronze Age activity dating to 800 BC. Rathgall is one of the few Late Bronze Age settlements discovered and excavated in the country.
“Rathgall was a site of quite exceptional importance. 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,” says Professor Raftery.
The last time the site was excavated was in 1974 but in early August, ahead of Heritage Week, the Office of Public Works (OPW) sent a team of UDC archaeologists to open a new part of the site that hadn’t been unearthed in previous excavations.
Tickets for the tour cost €5 for adults and €3 for children.
Pre booking is essential as space is limited to 40 people per tour. Contact Rathwood on 0599156285 for more information and bookings.
Birds of Prey centre Woodlands Falconry, based at Rathwood, will be also hosting daily flying displays to celebrate Heritage Week.
For more information and bookings, visit www.rathwood.com