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I think it is an axe head from the Neolithic period. We found it in one of the rivers that runs down onto Whitepark Bay beach. There are many limestone fossils to be found on this beach and also bivalve fossils, known as 'Devil's Toenails'and we have been told that the people there made tools from this stone, porcellanite,which were then exported as far afield as Europe. Some have been found in Spain. The river was used to smooth the stone after it had been shaped.

The polished stone axe is one of the most well know objects from the Neolithic period (c.4500-2500BC) when it was necessary to devise a tool to clear the forest of trees so that crops could be planted and animals enclosed within fields.

Although different types of stone could be used, outcrops of 'porcellanite' at Tievebulliagh near Cushendall and on Rathlin Ireland, proved the most popular. I don't know if the workers at Whitepark Bay used stones from nearby Rathlin, or whether some would have existed at Whitepark Bay or been washed up on the shore there?

Our axe head has not been polished up as much as the one in the link in Armagh County Museum - or maybe it was and was then in the sea for a long time?