HERoNI | The great Neolithic temple at Ballynahatty-death, ritual and the ancestors

Just six miles from the centre of Belfast, at Ballynahatty in County Down, is one of Ireland’s great Neolithic henge monuments: the 200m-wide Giant’s Ring. For well over a thousand years, this plateau above the River Lagan was the focus of intense funerary ritual including a great timber enclosure, 90m long, with an elaborate entrance and inner temple - a public building in the grand style, elegantly designed to control space, views, and access to an inner sanctum containing a platform for exposure of the dead. By 2550 BC the timber temple had been swept away in a massive conflagration replaced by one of the last great public ceremonial enterprises known to have been constructed by the Neolithic people of the north of Ireland – the Giant’s Ring. It has survived for 4,500 years, an enduring symbol of the ancestral heartland of the Neolithic farmers of the Lagan Valley and their enigmatic religion.

Barrie Hartwell is Honorary Curator and formerly Senior Research Officer in Archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast. He excavated the timber enclosure over 10 seasons during the 1990s and is editor with Sarah Gormley, Catriona Brogan and Caroline Malone of ‘Ballynahatty: Excavations in a Neolithic Monumental Landscape’.

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