A huge Irish monument once dubbed Ireland's "Stonehenge", may at one time have been a "school of astronomy", where ancient skywatchers studied the risings of various heavenly bodies during the year. The ancient ceremonial enclosure, at Ballynahattin just north of Dundalk, Co. Louth, was recorded by Thomas Wright in 1758 in his 'Louthiana', a survey of castles, antiquities and ancient remains of County Louth.

COMPARABLE WITH STONEHENGE

Britain's Stonehenge - it seems Ireland had one too

Wright described the site as the "ruinous remains of a temple or theatre on the planes (sic) of Ballynahatne, near Dundalk, enclosed on one side with a rampart and ditch, and seems to have been a great work, of the same kind with that at Stonehenge in England, being open to the East and composed of like circles of stones within."

"But it appears to be much older, many of the stones being broke, and others removed: The number of large ones in the outward circle, I judge to have been originally ten . . ." His drawing of the site shows a massive circle of stones outside the earthwork and a double ring of smaller stones in the interior.

BALLYNAHATTIN - THE SITE THAT DISAPPEARED!

In an amusing aside to this story of ancient astronomy, the 130-metre enclosure seemed to have disappeared in 1907, when Henry Morris wrote in the County Louth Archaeological Journal that the site was, "Gone! Cleared away; its very site not exactly known". Morris continued, "The townland of Ballynahaitinne is still there . . . but there is no Irish Stonehenge to be found in it. The site of this lay somewhere near the railway line, and some persons believe that it was destroyed when the railway line was being constructed."

Archaeologist Victor Buckley, co-author of the Archaeological Survey of County Louth, explained that the site had not disappeared at all, even though extensive enquiries by Henry Morris, and a field survey by the Office of Public Works in the 1960s, failed to 'unearth' the enclosure. "The answer to this lost 'site' lay in looking for it from the air," Buckley explained. Ireland's Stonehenge 'reappeared' in an aerial photograph of the townland of Carn Beg a few kilometers north of Dundalk taken in the early 1970s by Dr. J.K. St. Joseph, of Cambridge University.

Despite not being able to find the site in 1907, Henry Morris did have some tantalising information about the site: "I have read or heard it stated somewhere that this place was the site of a school of astronomy. Its position on the plain, with a semicircle of mountains around would enable an ancient astronomer to observe and mark the places where the various heavenly bodies appeared on the horizon at different times of the year."

This little anecdotal gem is important because it may show how the ancient monument builders used significant landmarks and distant horizon features to mark the risings and settings of heavenly bodies, as is the case at the Baltray standing stones, where the Rockabill Islands were used to mark the position of Winter Solstice sunrise.

Morris says that stone circles shown in Wright's illustration may also have been used for the same purpose. He has some praise for the 18th century author also: "Peace to the ashes of Thomas Wright! But for him we of this generation should never know of the existence of these mysterious monuments."

Works consulted: Buckley, V.M., 1988, "Ireland's Stonehenge - a lost antiquarian monument rediscovered", Archaeology Ireland 2, no. 2, pps.53-54. Buckley, V.M., and Sweetman, P.D., 1991 "Archaeological Survey of County Louth". Morris, Henry, 1907, "Louthiana: Ancient and Modern", County Louth Archaeological Journal, Vol. 1, No.4, pp.61.

Stonehenge in the mist by Christopher Holt
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Stonehenge in the snow from xmwallpapers.com
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