That distinction, quietly logged and largely unremarked upon, is the thing that makes Ballingowan genuinely odd. This is not a site that announces itself; it is a site that raises a question and then declines to answer it.

The pits came to light during excavations carried out by Rubicon Heritage Services ahead of the bypass construction. What they found were two rows forming a kind of avenue, oriented on a line running roughly east to west, tilted approximately eight degrees south of that axis. The rows were not perfectly parallel; the gap between them measured 8.6 metres at the eastern end and narrowed to 5.1 metres at the western end, giving the whole arrangement a very slight convergence. The northern row held 16 pits and the southern row 18, each row running to around 30 metres in length, with roughly a metre of space between individual pits. The pits themselves were modest in depth, the shallowest barely five centimetres, the deepest around 42 centimetres. Several of them showed evidence of post packing and post-pipes, the telltale signs left in the soil when a timber upright has been set into the ground and later removed or rotted away, which suggests the pits once held wooden posts forming a double-row avenue of some kind. Geophysical survey indicated the rows probably continued eastward beyond the area the road consumed, meaning what was excavated is only a portion of whatever the original structure was. No artefacts were recovered, and nothing suitable for radiocarbon dating was found, so the age of the monument remains entirely unknown. It could be prehistoric; it could be medieval. Without datable material, there is no way to say.

What lingers is the combination of specificity and blankness. The measurements are precise, the physical evidence is clear, the probable function as a post-built avenue is reasonable. But the date, the purpose, and any cultural context have gone entirely. It is, as far as anyone has been able to establish, a type of monument without a known parallel on the island, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say about any Irish archaeological site.