Ballynahattin

Ballynahattin (also Ballynahatne, Carn Beg - German  "called the Irish Stonehenge " ) is an extant stone circle north of Dundalk in County Louth in Ireland . The once largest stone circle in Ireland was described and drawn by Thomas Wright (1810–1877) in 1758 in his "Louthiana", a survey of ancient remains in County Louth.

Wright described the place on the plains of the townland Ballynahattin ( Irish Baile na hAitinne ) as the remains of a temple or theater, surrounded on one side by a rampart and moat, open to the east like Stonehenge in England and provided with stone circles on the inside. He originally determined the number of large stones in the outer circle to be ten. The drawing shows a massive stone circle outside the earthwork and a double ring of smaller stones inside.

Henry Morris wrote about the 130 m enclosure in the County Louth Archaeological Journal of 1907. The site was near the railway line and was destroyed when the railway line was built. Archaeologist Victor M. Buckley stated in 1960 that the place cannot have disappeared. In aerial photographs of townlands Carn Beg ( An Carn Beag , near Ballynahattin) he was in the early 1970s as Cropmark ( English cropmark ) recovered in the cornfield and its shape and size were confirmed.

literature

• Seán Ó Nualláin: Stone Circles in Ireland. Country House, Dublin, 1995 ISBN 0946172455
• Aubrey Burl: A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, pp. 218-219

Individual evidence

1. ↑ “Run out” is the term used to describe systems that have left little or no trace.

Web links

• Description (Engl.)

Coordinates: 54 ° 1 ′ 40.4 ″  N , 6 ° 24 ′ 43.9 ″  W.