Keentagh

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Keentagh is a small townland in County Down, Northern Ireland. Its name probably comes from An Caointeach in Irish. It lies about 4 km southeast of Portaferry and covers around 61 hectares (151 acres). It sits within the Ballyphilip civil parish and the Quintin Electoral Division, in the Ards Upper barony.

People have lived in the area since the Neolithic period. The Millin Bay Cairn is a large late Neolithic burial site built between 3000 and 2000 BC. Today it appears as a low, grassy oval mound with a surrounding stone ring overlooking Millin Bay. Inside the main burial chamber (the cist) were the remains of at least 15 individuals, plus cremated remains of another person. The bones were not arranged as full skeletons but were grouped by type.

Around the central cist is an oval of stones, with a bank of shingle outside it. Seven smaller cists lie outside this oval, some containing cremated bones. The whole site was covered by a long sand mound. Some stones are carved with decorative pecked designs, suggesting links to the wider passage tomb tradition. Other finds include flints, a fragment of a polished axe, Neolithic pottery, and Carrowkeel ware. DNA testing has shown links between some bones from Millin Bay and those found at Newgrange.

Today only the tops of about a dozen stones from the cairn’s outer ring remain visible. In 2004–2005, geophysical surveys and small-scale excavations were carried out to the south of the monument to learn more about a drystone wall noted in earlier work. The surveys did not locate buried features or the wall section, partly because the digging was limited. They did identify large stones likely from a collapsed wall in the trenches near the monument, and found late medieval or early modern pits with charcoal. A few finds included a struck flint and a piece of corroded modern iron.