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A Promontory Fort on the Antrim Coast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

V. Gordon Childe
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Extract

Larriban or Larry Bane Head is a limestone promontory rising sheer some 150 ft. above the sea in the townland of Knocksoghey, parish of Ballintoy, about a mile east of the caves recently examined by Dr. Jackson. The neck of the promontory has been cut off by a rampart and fosse about 100 ft. from its extremity. The fort thus formed gives its name to the headland, Leath Rath Ban, the Half White Fort. Before the war more than half the enclosed area and a section of the rampart had been quarried away and the original fosse materially altered. According to the report furnished by Thomas Fagan to the Ordnance Survey in 1838 the defended area measured ‘about half a rood’, and the ‘moat was on an average 23 ft. in width’. One of the workers employed at the quarry remembers that the entrance to the fort was near the centre of the rampart. It has now been destroyed. The quarrying has, however, left an instructive section through the rampart. In this section Mr. Blake Whelan found portions of a pot standing in what seemed to be a sort of kiln in the centre of the wall. The surviving portions of building here might outline the back of a guard chamber opening near the main entrance which must have traversed the wall close at hand (P in fig. I).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , April 1936 , pp. 179 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1936

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References

page 179 note 1 Ordnance Survey of Ireland MS. Box 3, co. Antrim, Ballintoy Parish, no. 3, p. 63.

page 179 note 2 The pot has been presented to Belfast Museum.

page 191 note 1 Plate from a composite double-edged comb from top layer in section 2. On one edge two holes for the rivets whereby the plate was attached to the clamping bar can be seen on the margin of the plate. Both faces are decorated with dot-and-circle ornament, executed before the rivet-holes were bored (fig. 6, I).

page 194 note 1 J.R.S.A.I. xxiii (1893), 36. The Moylarg crannog produced a lead cross of ninth to tenth-century type and other relics of the same sort of date as well as three polished stone axes, a flint arrow-head, and nine ‘tracked stones’.

page 195 note 1 I have to thank Miss M. I. Platt, of the Royal Scottish Museum, for the identification of the bones and shells.

page 197 note 1 Belfast Nat. Hist, and Phil. Soc. Proc. 1916-17, pl. 1.

page 197 note 2 Ibid. p. 98.