County Boundary Stone, 104 Seacon Road, Drumaduan, Ballymoney, Co Antrim, BT53 6QA

County Boundary Stone, Seacon Road

This is a small cast or stamped concrete boundary marker, approximately 300 by 600 by 150 millimetres, positioned in the grass verge at the north side of Seacon Road, four kilometres south-east of Coleraine and five kilometres north-west of Ballymoney. The marker delimits the boundary between County Antrim and County Londonderry. The front face bears lettering approximately 25 to 35 millimetres high, reading "COUNTY BOUNDARY ANTRIM DERRY", where the horizontal words "ANTRIM" and "DERRY" are interlaced with the vertical word "BOUNDARY", using the letters "A" and "Y" as shared characters. The concrete core is visible at the centre, top, and front of the stone where damage to the cast surface has occurred. The marker tilts slightly towards the north-east, and its base is not visible. The concrete construction and the styling of the inscription suggest a date from the very late 19th or early 20th century, possibly associated with the introduction of County Councils following the 1898 Local Government (Ireland) Act.

This stone is one of six similar markers set along rural roadsides in the area north and west of Ballymoney and east and south of Coleraine, Portstewart, and Portrush. These markers demarcate the land boundary between Counties Antrim and Londonderry, particularly marking changes in the direction of that boundary. The stone was marked for the first time on the Ordnance Survey map of 1950. A similar example from Glebe townland south of Portrush was photographed and captioned "A curious county boundary stone" in the Belfast Telegraph of 21 May 1940, indicating that the origins of these stones were already obscure by that date. Of the six known surviving stones, at least one other stone, located along Newbridge Road just south of this site, was removed around 2020. Despite their small size and simple detailing, these unusual boundary markers are of local and historical importance as rare surviving examples of this particular method of demarcating county boundaries.