Ballinvally Stone Circle View all content for Ballinvally

A last, fleeting visit before the third grim lockdown. I’d been here many times before but never made it to the circle, not confident enough to venture across the fields and over the fences. I’d read Ken Williams’s notes before but had forgotten the directions. We approached from the south, across marshy ground and traversing a small stream and a fence. To be honest the place left me feeling a bit cold. It’s not the stones fault, just the air of general disregard and neglect and the mud and the grey December lightless atmosphere, all combining to a rushed and cursory visit. The place is puzzling anyway - was it a ‘true’ circle? The stones seem too large to be the remains of a kerb, and if you were to destroy a cairn here, why leave these remains? The north-eastern stone is unsatisfyingly mis-aligned, if these are the remains of a ‘true’ stone circle. And yet the stones retain a power. All are large, most bulky, except the one at the north-west, the most slab-like. Beside this is where the passage-like stones jut out at a tangent. Over to the east a low double wall runs roughly north-south inside the ‘circle’. It looks ancient. The south-eastern stone is eroding nicely with runnels and gullies that are beginning to fill with soil. The stones are at the east end of a field that slopes down from the west. At the top of the field there is a large habitation site and over the field wall is the impressive bivallate rath in the neighbouring townland of Drumsawry or Summerbank. A small standing stone is about 200 metres south-west of the ‘circle’.

Posted by ryaner 6th January 2021ce

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