Skalka hillfort
The TRAIL 2027 excursion takes us to the hillfort of Skalka, an easy walk of about twenty minutes from the venue. Skalka is a wooded hill at the edge of the Považský Inovec mountains, rising some 50 m above the flat floodplain of the Váh, one of Slovakia’s main rivers. The height was enough to give its inhabitants a commanding view of the valley, and it still does. The accessible eastern and northern sides are protected by two earthen ramparts; to the west the hill drops away in a steep rocky slope that needed no wall. The site has never been excavated. What we know comes from pottery sherds collected during tree planting in the late 1930s, which show that the hilltop was occupied around the turn of the first millennium BC/AD, in the period of the Púchov culture, a Celtic-influenced group of the northern Carpathians, and again in the early Middle Ages. Further sherds found on the track below the hill suggest earlier activity in the Bronze Age or early Iron Age.
Skalka is also the site used in the workshop on point cloud processing “from the computer to the mobile phone”, so the excursion is a chance to take the workshop outputs into the field on your own device and compare them with what is actually there. The hill is a good test of lidar’s limits: a deep erosion gully cuts into the slope, and below the summit stands the tomb of the Rakovský family, the former owners of the manor house that hosts the meeting, whose standing walls are a small lesson in what airborne lidar does and does not record.
During the excursion we will also fly a short UAV lidar survey with a DJI Matrice carrying a Zenmuse L3 sensor, and talk about flight planning, sensor settings and the regulations that apply to this kind of work.
Excursion organisers
dr. Tibor Lieskovský, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.
All images by Peter Marčan, from Mapy.
