Exploring mysterious tombs in rural Ireland
ABOUT half a mile past the entrance to Newgrange, in the Valley of the Boyne, County Meath, Ireland, is a handmade sign with an arrow that reads “Irish crafts for sale”.
I am, of course, fascinated by Newgrange, a Neolithic site that predates Stonehenge by a thousand years, but I can never pass up yarn, so I turned into a modest farm, damp, green, full of sheep, well-used equipment and warning signs – “This is not a playground.”
In the shop, Allison, the owner, was at the spinning machine, and of course I did buy a sweater, hand-knit, pale green cable, for my granddaughter, and also a Christmas tree ornament that looks like a sheep. We chatted about Allison’s flock (170 of them), their breed (hornless Irish Belclare).
I drove away and turned into the parking lot at Newgrange, but the farm cast an interesting glow over the ancient but beautifully rebuilt site – this is a place long inhabited, where passing observations of sunlight, rain, animal interactions, the growth of the rich greenery, how lives must or might be lived flicker in the atmosphere like sparkles of mist.
Newgrange is called a “passage mound” or “passage tomb”, but what is it really? If we are lucky, what we get when we visit an ancient site is a sense of the intelligence that designed and built the structure even if we might not understand what belief system they were acting under.
Indeed, perhaps Newgrange is a giant calendar, a giant clock, a giant belief system, built without mortar, lost and present at the same time.
This time of year, Newgrange takes on a special significance when the site becomes mysteriously aligned with the rising sun at the winter solstice, flooding its interior with an almost mystical light.
It is 103 metres in diameter, slightly larger than the circumference of the outer ring at Stonehenge. The white quartz stones that make up the outer wall were brought here from Wicklow (114 kilometres south) and the granite cobbles from Rathcor (64 kilometres north). The stones I saw are a reproduction of the original.
Ninety-seven larger boulders, known as kerbstones, averaging 3 tonnes apiece, were brought from a site on the Irish Sea about 30 kilometres to the north, but even if they were floated on boats all the way to this spot, they would still have had to be dragged about a halfmile up the hill from the River Boyne to the monument.
The underlying stone structure is hidden by a smooth, slightly flattened and peacefullooking grassy lawn.
This was my second visit in two days, there was much to see, and the line was short – there were maybe 10 of us waiting. My turn came, and I climbed the outer stairs, then went down into the entryway. The stone in front of the entrance is a large oval that has been carefully incised with carved connecting spirals.
Perhaps more unique is the “roofbox” – something like an open window set onto the heavy lintel stone that defines the doorway. The two people who went before me came out, and I entered the passage. Like many ancient passages, it wasn’t built for tall women like me.
Heavy stone slabs lean inward, it is a tight corridor; I felt as if I was walking slightly down hill. There was a little light, and I avoided bumping my head, but I could hardly see the interior engravings. At the bottom of the path, it was difficult to gauge how far I’d come.
There was nothing grand about the passage until I got to the bottom and turned around. The guide told us what to look at. And then the demonstration – how, for 16 minutes on the morning of the winter solstice, and only then, the sun shines through the roofbox, down the passage right to the bottom, right to what might be some sort of altar with a basin sitting on it.
Someone outside shone a light through the roofbox (which was discovered in 1963), demonstrating the effect. I imagined the miracle of such a thing, total darkness pierced so precisely by sunlight. The tools used to build the monument were made entirely of stone, bone and wood.
‘Astonishing amount of art’
Later, I drove to the mouth of the River Boyne, on the Irish Sea.
The River Boyne loops south from County Louth into County Meath about 5 kilometres west of Drogheda, and inside this loop, there are more than 40 prehistoric sites, set on hilltops, and visible one from another. One of the special pleasures of Newgrange and the Valley of the Boyne is the sense of history as something rural rather than urban.
Knowth may be the most elaborate and historically wellused assembly of tombs – 18 in all – and passages. Knowth was, perhaps, more important in its day than Newgrange. Excavation there began in the late 1960s and was immediately productive.
In a 2008 article in the Irish Times, archaeologist George Eogan recalled crawling up the eastern passage, carrying a light, and coming to a “void” at the end.
He said: “In my great excitement I jumped down 6 or 7 feet, and to my amazement I found that what I had jumped into was a massive cruciform [cross-shaped] chamber.
“There was an astonishing amount of art and a magnificent stone basin in the righthand recess.”
Eogan’s group has also found evidence of pottery, houses and flint from 4000 BC, in addition to finds from the same period as Newgrange.
Archaeologists and investigators are not finished in the Valley of the Boyne. Many things are waiting to be discovered, put together, understood. As I looked across the rich green flow of the hills toward the setting sun, I expected to come back to this mystery.