Ballon Hill is a

bronze age The Bronze Age () was a historical period characterised principally by the use of bronze tools and the development of complex urban societies, as well as the adoption of writing in some areas. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of ...

hilltop enclosure encompassing burial grounds located near the village of

Ballon, County Carlow Ballon () is a village, civil parish and townland in County Carlow, Ireland. It is located on the N80 road near Carlow town. Amenities Money from "Siopa Glas" on Main Street is channelled back into the village, school garden and to local chari ...

Description

Ballon Hill is an archaeological site, listed as an Irish National Monument, which sits on a low hill near Ballon village. Predominately used as a burial site from the bronze age, the features of the site were only discovered during excavations in the 19th century and in a more recent archaeological survey using

Lidar Lidar (, also LIDAR, an acronym of "light detection and ranging" or "laser imaging, detection, and ranging") is a method for determining ranging, ranges by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected li ...

History

The site appears to have been used for burials from 2200 BC, with at least three burial sites dating from that time. Excavated by John James Lecky and J. Richardson Smith from 1853 to 1855, the site yielded one of the largest assemblies of pottery ever discovered in Ireland. The use of the site seems to have been at its height from 2020 to 1920 BC. Much of the pottery from the site is now housed in the

National Museum of Ireland The National Museum of Ireland () is Ireland's leading museum institution, with a strong emphasis on national and some international archaeology, Irish history, Irish art, culture, and natural history. It has three branches in Dublin, the arch ...

and the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

. In 1997, the

Carlow County Museum Carlow County Museum () is a museum documenting the history of County Carlow. Located on College Street in Carlow town, the building was originally the Presentation Convent; it also houses the County Library and Archives. History The museum was ...

received an unsolicited donation of razor knife and two polished stones from one of the excavated graves. In 2012 the Ballon Hill Archaeology Project was established to conduct a new survey of the site, funded by the Carlow Historical and Archaeological Society and Carlow County Development Partnership, using Lidar and other modern surveying tools. The results of this work were published as a report in 2014, and as an article in the ''

Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland is an Irish learned society whose aims are "to preserve, examine and illustrate all ancient monuments and memorials of the arts, manners and customs of the past, as connected with the antiquities, langua ...

''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ballon Hill National monuments in County Carlow