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Townland

Ballynahatty

The Giant’s Ring is the most visible part of a prehistoric landscape investigated through aerial photography and excavation.

Watercolour and fine ink illustration of the surviving stone chamber and sloping capstone inside the grassy Giant’s Ring earthwork at Ballynahatty.
Illustration, surviving chamber at the Giant’s Ring, Ballynahatty, County Down
Recorded locationBallynahatty54.54566° N · 5.95270° WInteractive map supplied by OpenStreetMap.
Recorded place location · Logainm.ie

The name

A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.

Recorded forms

  • Ballynahatty · English · main form

Place & story

The standing monument

The Giant’s Ring in Ballynahatty is a large circular earthwork surrounding the surviving stone chamber of a tomb. The Department for Communities describes the henge as roughly 200 metres across and dates it to about 2700 BC. Five upright stones and a capstone remain from the tomb, originally covered by a mound of stone and earth. [2]

People & connections

Barrie Hartwell’s excavation in 1990

Aerial photographs revealed another enclosure nearby, marked by two rows of timber posts. Barrie Hartwell’s report records a three-week excavation in September 1990, which found deep pits probably intended for substantial posts. Identifiable charcoal was predominantly oak. With no artefacts securely associated with the pits, he awaited radiocarbon results and treated a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age date as provisional. The report captures the process of investigating a landscape extending beyond the visible Giant’s Ring. [3]

Geographic information

Place type
Townland
County
Down
Civil parish
Drumbo
Coordinates
54.54566, -5.95270
Mapped area
0.98 km²
Logainm ID
66137 ↗

People & family history

Census figures refer to the matched historical census area for each year. Boundaries and spellings can change over time.

1901 census

103People recorded
27Households recorded

Most frequent surnames in this year’s matched records

  • McCleave 13
  • Maxwell 9
  • Shimmon 9
  • McKeown 8
  • Johnston 7
Explore the 1901 records ↗

1926 census

This year is outside the available dataset’s coverage. This does not indicate a population of zero.

Sources & further reading

  1. Logainm.ie — Ballynahatty. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  2. Giant’s Ring: monument description · Department for Communities
  3. 1990:026, Ballynahatty 5, excavation report · Barrie Hartwell, Department of Archaeology, Queen’s University Belfast
  4. Boundary geometry retains its source attribution and licence in the downloadable geographic record. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.
  5. Surviving chamber at the Giant’s Ring, Ballynahatty, County Down illustration: based on a Giant's Ring, Belfast by Rossographer. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. Additional reference: Giant's Ring, Belfast by Rossographer, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2019-06-27. How this page was prepared.