Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Just outside of Dublin, ancient history dazzles
While Dublin beckons with reminders of its stirring modern history on nearly every street corner, the best place to commune with the ancient soul of Ireland is its lush countryside. Iron Age monuments pepper the landscape, and while most sights are little more than rock piles, just standing next to a megalith that predates the pharaohs is stirring.
An ideal spot to experience the spirit of Old Eire is the Boyne River Valley, which offers a world-class concentration of historical and spiritual sites an hour’s drive north of Dublin.
The most popular attraction there is the archaeological site of Bru na Boinne, or “dwelling place of the Boyne.” Upon arrival, visitors get appointments to tour the 5,000-year-old passage tombs: Newgrange and Knowth. Thoughtprovoking and mind-bogglingly old, these tombs can give you chills. Exploring them, you begin to understand the reverence that ancient people had for nature and the need they felt to bury their dead in great tombs. These massive, grass-covered burial mounds were built with a deep chamber inside, reached by a narrow stone passage. Both tombs are worth seeing, but if you have time for just one, I’d pick Newgrange because you can go inside, and it’s more famous.
Dating from 3200 B.C., Newgrange is 500 years older than the pyramids at Giza. Like Stonehenge, the ancients aligned this monument with the stars. At dawn on the winter solstice, the sun’s rays hit a small opening or “roof box” above the narrow passage. The beams reach deep into the burial chamber, illuminating its inner reaches for 17 minutes with a natural light show. While we know nothing of Newgrange’s builders, this most certainly was a sacred spot for a cult of the dead, a cult of the sun or both.
This grassy mound is 250 feet across and 40 feet high and ringed by dozens of “kerbstones,” each about 9 feet long and weighing 5 tons. In front of the doorway lies the most famous of the kerbstones, the 10-by-4foot entrance stone. Its left half is carved with three mysterious spirals, which have become a kind of poster child for prehistoric art.
A guide takes visitors deep into the tomb, down a 60-foot narrow passageway, leading to the cross-shaped central chamber under a 20-foot-high igloo-type stone dome. The ancients placed bones and ashes here, under 200,000 tons of stone and dirt, to wait for that special winter’s moment. In an awe-inspiring climax, the guide turns off the lights, submerging you in total darkness. Then he switches on a distant light that gradually brightens, re-creating the rays of the sun as seen on the shortest day of the year.
A short drive away, you’ll find the Hill of Tara, the most important center of political and religious power in pre-Christian Ireland. This is where Ireland’s ancient kings claimed their throne and where St. Patrick preached his deal clinching sermon converting the pagans to Christianity.
Aerial views of the hill show plenty of mystifying circles and lines, but on ground level there’s more to feel than to see. As you wander among the wellworn ditches and hills, you’ll see the Mound of Hostages (a Bronze Age passage grave, circa 2500 B.C.), a couple of ancient sacred stones and a war memorial. Standing on the Hill of Tara, you can imagine the history of this land as you take in views over the Emerald Isle.
Elsewhere in the Valley of the Boyne, the pastoral, riverside Battle of the Boyne site is one of Europe’s most pivotal battlegrounds. In the battle that occurred here, the Protestant British broke Catholic resistance, establishing Protestant rule over all of Ireland and Britain. The visitors center is housed in a mansion built on the battlefield, but the real attraction is reached by crossing the Boyne River on a metal bridge. This spot, called “old bridge,” is where the most frantic action took place on that bloody day in 1690. If you’re there in the summer, go on a Sunday afternoon for a “Living History” demonstration. Guides clad in 17th-century garb give musket-firing demos and re-create a cavalry charge.
The alley of the Boyne is a joy by car, because all the described sights are within a 30-minute drive of one another. Though the sights are on tiny roads, they’re well-marked with brown, tourist-friendly road signs. If you get an early start, you could see the entire region in a day. Visit the capital of ancient Irish kings, crawl through burial mounds older than the pyramids and be back in Dublin in time for dinner and a pub crawl.