Ballynahatty is a townland (a subset of a parish) located 5 miles to the south of Belfast city centre in the Lagan valley. It has long been known for the Giant’s Ring, a late Neolithic henge monument and the largest prehistoric ceremonial enclosure on the island of Ireland. With a diameter of 180m (590ft), the circular earthwork encloses an area measuring 2.8ha (7 acres), with a bank that rises to 3.6m (12ft) in places.
At the centre of the ring lie the truncated remains of a passage grave, described by mid-19th-century antiquaries as a Druidic altar where (according to J B Doyle in Tours in Ulster, 1854): ‘many thousands may have assembled to witness the awful rites of their sanguinary religion; and where no objects could attract their attention from the priest, the huge altar stone, the human sacrifices, and the glorious luminary [the sun] that formed the principal object of their adoration’.
