4,000 year old Wright’s Stonehenge found

JUNE 1988

A Stonehenge-type site, dating back 4,000 years, is rediscovered near Dundalk.

However, it is of purely archaeological interest as the stones are no longer standing, so there will be no major tourist attraction on the town’s doorstep.

The location is in Ballynahattin, alongside the main railway line.

The site is referenced by Thomas Wright in his 1758 publication ‘Louthiana’.

He describes ‘ruinous remains of a temple or theatre on the plains of Ballynahatne, near Dundalk, closed on one side with a rampart and ditch, and it seems to have been a great work of the same kind with that of Stonehenge in England, being open to the east.’

However, in 1907 a paper by Henry Morris in the Louth Archaeological Journal says the site is ‘gone, cleared away!’ and when the Office of Public Works carries out extensive field work in the 1960s, it too is unable to trace the monument.

Subsequent to that an aerial survey is done and according to an article in Archaeology Ireland by Victor Buckley, an archaeologist in the Office of Public Works, through a photograph taken by Dr JK St Joseph of Cambridge University, the site is relocated.

Mr Buckley explains that equipment in the National Monument Service of the OPW is among the most advanced in Europe and through its use in reading the photo, it brought this to light.

‘In its way it is quite a discovery and there is an interim preservation on the site,’ he adds.

By pure chance Mr Buckley twigs, on examining the photo that it isn’t a ring fort, rather Wright’s ‘Stonehenge’.

It is only from the air that the pattern of the site can be made out.