What is recorded here

Eleven Ballyboes holds a drowned kitchen where human hands shaped flint before the sea swallowed the land. Blades and cores still litter the rocky cove, waiting for low tide to reveal what the water took. The peat beneath Lough Foyle dates to the Earlier Mesolithic, suggesting these are not lost tools but remnants of a home the ocean erased.

At a small rocky cove overlooking Lough Foyle. Worked flint was found lying on the beach in the intertidal zone, only accessible during low tides (McNaught 1998; SMR File; NMI Report 23 September 1999). Similar lithics were recovered from the intertidal zone at the adjacent cove c. 90m to W (DG022-010----; DG022-012----; DG022-013). The flints, which include flakes, blades and cores, have been typologically dated to the Earlier Mesolithic period (Costa et al. 2001, 1-8). This material may have eroded out of a midden/settlement site located above the beach. Alternatively, it is possible that it was washed out of a submerged palaeo-landscape which lies beneath the waters of Lough Foyle (Costa et al. 2001, 1; Westley 2015, 243-257). Remnants of a submerged peat layer were recorded on the seabed at this cove. Samples from the base and top of the peat layer date it to c.9.4–8.7 cal ka BP, contemporary with the Earlier Mesolithic period. The lithics, therefore, may derive from settlement sites in an esturine landscape that has since been inundated by rising sea levels (Westley 2015, 252-253). Another concentration of flints (DG022-014----) was recovered in 2019 c. 200m to NW. Compiled by: Jane O'Shaughnessy Date of revised upload: 27 October 2021

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