When nine-year-old Harper from Finaghy Primary School pulled a broken arrowhead from the earth outside Belfast last month, she became part of something ancient. The arrowhead was buried alongside a stone circle that had lain undetected for roughly 4,000 years — a reminder that the ground beneath our feet still holds secrets waiting for curious hands to find them.
Archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast, working alongside community volunteers and schoolchildren through the Community Archaeology Programme Northern Ireland, uncovered the previously unknown stone circle near the Giant's Ring. The discovery came after the team spotted unusual crop marks in aerial photography that extended far beyond what anyone had expected.
We decided to dig deeper and work with community volunteers and schoolchildren to try to piece together the area's hidden history, said Brian Sloan, who led the excavation in the School of Natural and Built Environment.
The site forms part of the Ballynahatty Ritual Complex, a sprawling collection of more than 50 known archaeological monuments spanning the southern end of the Malone Ridge. Researchers first suspected the area held significance in the 1990s, when Queen's archaeologist Barrie Hartwell uncovered a Neolithic temple nearby — a structure complete with a timber circle and internal excarnation platform thought to have been used for processing the dead.
This newest circle dates to the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, though its exact purpose remains as mysterious as the stones themselves. Scholars believe such structures may have hosted religious ceremonies or served as prehistoric calendars aligned with celestial events — the site at Beaghmore in County Tyrone offers one compelling comparison, its stones positioned to mark the movements of the sun and moon.
Unfortunately, the Belfast circle wasn't fully preserved. Nineteenth-century farmers dismantled portions of the site to clear land for agriculture, a common fate for ancient monuments scattered across the Irish landscape.
Yet what emerged from this excavation was more than archaeological data. Volunteers of all ages spent weeks in the field, battling heavy rain and scorching sunshine alike, uncovering fragments of a story that stretches back millennia. For Harper and her classmates, the experience offered something rarer still: a direct, tangible connection to people who walked this same ground when the pyramids were barely 1,000 years old.
It has been fantastic to work alongside community volunteers and schoolchildren, Sloan said. They're delighted with what they have helped uncover — and with what remains to be discovered. The dig continues.