What is recorded here

Carnbane East in County Meath holds a split pentagonal stone covered in thirty-four cupmarks and ten circle motifs. The rock later became a mass stone in Glen an Aifrinn, where Owen Scally may have celebrated faith beside ancient marks. Human hands shaped the stone before Christian worship gathered around it, layering memory on memory under the open sky.

This erratic is located towards the bottom of the N-facing slope of Carnbane East, and has been fully recorded by Shee Twohig (et al. 2010, 16-17). The pentagonal upper surface (dims c. 1.6m x 1.5m) has split and moved out of line but slopes upward slightly to the SE. The W part has two faint cup and circle motifs and one cup and double circle. There are also eighteen cupmarks. The E part has six cup and circles motifs, four of which are in a curve and may be connected by a line, and sixteen cupmarks. The stone was re-used as a mass-rock at a place called Glen an Aifrinn – the glen of the mass. In 1704 Rev. Owen Scally was the Roman Catholic priest of Oldcastle and Moylagh, and mass was said at this time in Glenenerrin (Cogan 1862-70, vol. 2, 377). (Eogan 2011, 4, No. 2) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 3 March, 2017

Likely dating to the Neolithic or Bronze Age, the rock art at Ballinvally may have held ritual or symbolic significance, possibly linked to landscape features or early farming communities. No specific folklore is recorded for this site.

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