Ballynahatty: Reconstructing a rare Neolithic timber monument

Ballynahatty, in County Down, Northern Ireland, is an astonishing site that deserves to be far better known for what it tells us about Neolithic timber monuments. At the core of the site is a series of deep post pits that once held 471 tree-sized wooden posts. The newly published excavation report seeks to reconstruct the original appearance of the monument and tell the story of its creation, use, and deliberate destruction, as Chris Catling reports.

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Current Archaeology

September 7, 2023

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 sanguina

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