What is recorded here

Eleven Ballyboes is a small rocky cove on the northwest shore of Lough Foyle where the tide still reveals blades, flakes and cores from the Earlier Mesolithic. The flints may have slipped down from a lost settlement above the beach, or they may have been washed out of a whole landscape now drowned beneath the lough. Either way, the sea keeps returning what it took, handing back a kitchen or a village in fragments that glitter like broken glass at low water.

At the W end of a small rocky cove on the NW shoreline of Lough Foyle. A large amount of worked flint was found lying on sands and gravels of in the intertidal zone, only accessible during low tides (McNaught 1998; SMR File; NMI Report 23 September 1999). This material may have been washed out of a midden/settlement site located above the beach. Alternatively, it is possible that it was washed out of a palaeo-landscape which has since been inundated by the sea and now lies beneath the waters of Lough Foyle (Costa et al. 2001, 1; Westley 2015, 243-257). Similar lithics were recovered nearby (DG022-010----; DG022-012) and at the adjacent cove (DG022-011----) c. 90m to E. The flints, which include flakes, blades and cores, have been typologically dated to the Earlier Mesolithic period (Costa et al. 2001, 1-8). Another concentration of flints (DG022-014----) was recovered in 2019 c. 100m to NW. Compiled by: Jane O'Shaughnessy Date of revised upload: 27 October 2021

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