Dunnyneill Islands

Dunnyneill Islands, a pair of stones joined by a causeway in southern Strangford Lough, became a seventh-century trading emporium where merchants from Russia, Germany, Iceland and France exchanged wine and luxury goods for furs, seal skin, slaves and Irish wolfhounds. The main island measured one hundred yards across, while the smaller companion waited at the causeway’s end. A long rectangular hut appeared there around 900 AD during the Viking invasions, then the place slept until the thirteenth century, when a belt buckle and new life returned to its soils.