Ancient Ireland's Mysterious Tombs
About a half-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), the problem with horned sheep (Daisy, for
example, though hornless, is inconveniently dominating, always trying to give the other ewes a poke).

Boyne Valley Wools Craft Shop, Located less than a 5 minute walk from the Brú na Bóinne visitor centre.
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.
I steered my rental car between lovely metalwork gates that reproduce the style
of the Neolithic engravings at Newgrange, which looks like a huge green beret
set neatly onto a green hillside in a gently rolling landscape.
Newgrange is a popular destination, and tickets are first come first served.
It 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.

Newgrange World Heritage Site | Prehistoric passage tomb, built around 3200 BCE
It is 338 feet 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 (71 miles south) and the granite cobbles from Rathcor
(40 miles north). The stones I saw are a reproduction of the original.
Ninety-seven larger boulders, known as kerbstones, averaging three tons
apiece, were brought from a site on the Irish Sea about 19 miles 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 half-mile up the hill
from the River Boyne to the monument. The underlying stone structure is
hidden by a smooth, slightly flattened and peaceful-looking 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.

Newgrange features a facade adorned with white quartz stones, creating a striking and reflective surface
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 17 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 an electric 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.

Winter Solstice Sunbeam in the Newgrange passage
Later, I drove to the mouth of the River Boyne, on the Irish Sea, 31 miles north of the River Liffey,
which flows through Dublin. The landscape is flat, and, this day, a little damp
and gloomy. The shingle beach, edged by wild green plants of all types,
stretches toward a broad estuary. Even to me, the river seemed to promise an
easy and productive trip inland. It is evident why countless men in ships
accepted the invitation - in 2013 a boat made of logs, possibly 5,500 years old
with "a pair of oval shaped blisters on the upper edge" indicating oars,
according to reports, was found near Drogheda, not far from where a dredging
operation in 2006 revealed a Viking ship.
At the mouth of the Boyne, there are two Neolithic standing stones
(mythologized as a cow and her beloved calf). I crossed the river in Drogheda,
a medieval town five miles inland. Since I grew up beside the mile-wide Mississippi,
known in St. Louis as "The Big Muddy," the River Boyne reminded me more of a creek
(as it passes through Drogheda, it is 140 feet wide), but it is deep, full of fish,
easily navigable, just the sort of river that spawns civilizations.
The
River Boyne loops south from County Louth into County Meath
about three miles 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, deep history, as something rural rather
than urban. Drogheda was founded by the Normans toward the end of the 12th century.
I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast south of town, near the giant tanks of a local dairy,
and drove through the countryside from one site to another.
The biggest battle in Irish history was the
Battle of the Boyne,
fought just west of Drogheda in 1690 between King James II of England, who had been deposed and was
attempting to regain his kingdom, and William of Orange, the Dutch choice of English Protestants.
James had 23,000 troops and William had 36,000. William won, reinforcing and entrenching the
conquest of Ireland by the English. The museum dedicated to the Battle of the Boyne - an
elegantly refurbished 1740 early Palladian-syle mansion that looks out over a vast and very
green set of fields just where William's troops crossed the river and attacked James's - was completed in 2008.

Oldbridge House - Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre
The Battle of the Boyne was significant to the rediscovery of Newgrange, which had been ignored
or used as a source for building materials, because a follower of William of Orange, Charles Campbell,
took over the property. Campbell, too, saw the monument as a pile of building material, but when
his laborers removed some of the stones, they discovered the entrance to what they assumed was a cave.
The first person to become curious about what really made up the mound was a Welsh naturalist,
Edward Lhwyd (pronounced "Lloyd"), a friend of Isaac Newton. Lloyd, well known for precision,
wrote four letters about Newgrange, in 1699 and 1700, detailing what he saw as the mound was
excavated. Campbell himself also explored the site, and he reported to a later visitor,
Sir Thomas Molyneux, that the bones of two complete corpses had been found, a man and a woman.
Lhwyd didn't report the human remains, but they were uncovered in 1967, when modern archaeologists
were excavating the site. The skeletons were a bit of a conundrum - Molyneux speculated in
a published 1726 account that they were the remains of a prominent man and his wife, a la Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
At least 15 antiquarians visited the mound at Newgrange in the 200 years between Molyneux
and the first truly modern investigator, George Coffey, who visited in the 1890s and again
in 1912. All were perplexed by the origins of the mound, and none of them thought that
ancient Irish inhabitants could have been capable of building such a structure.
Undoubtedly, this was because the Valley of the Boyne is deep inside "the Pale" - the area
of Ireland that came under the control of the English in the mid-12th century. A ditch and
rampart that enclosed parts of Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare defined "the Pale" and cut
English-based scholars off from Celtic literature and history. But the Old Irish literature
of invaders from the east was well aware that the Celts had been preceded by a group that
they called the Tuatha De Danann.
I kept driving. The roads are narrow, neatly hedged. Sometimes the valley is open and
scenic; other times the trees seem to close in. To the northeast there is
Dowth,
the smallest, least well-known of the passage tombs and, from the road, the most private of the
three sites - over the top of the hedgerow, I could see the passage mound bulging green and
uneven, the absolute emblem of mysterious privacy.

Dowth, the most private of the three major Megalithic Passage Tombs in the Boyne Valley
Two mounds have been discovered, but the site has not been rebuilt. A narrow series of roads runs
from there past farmhouses and fields of black and white cows, past Newgrange again. The view
of Newgrange up the hill from the road was beautiful; the view from Newgrange was rolling, green, utterly quiet.
Knowth may be the most elaborate and historically well-used assembly
of tombs - 18 in all - and passages. Knowth was, perhaps, more important in its day than
Newgrange. Excavation here began in the late 1960s, and was immediately productive. In a
2008 article in The Irish Times, the archaeologist George Eogan recalled crawling up the
eastern passage (there is also a western passage), carrying a light, and coming to a "void"
at the end. He said, "In my great excitement I jumped down six or seven 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 right-hand
recess." Mr. Eogan's group has also found evidence of pottery, houses and flint from 4000 B.C.,
in addition to finds from the same period as Newgrange.
Knowth is more irregular in appearance than Newgrange, but at least as impressive. And there
is plenty of evidence that post-Neolithic inhabitants of the area were aware of, and made use
of, the facilities at Knowth - one of the oddest remains is graffiti on the stones in the
passages from between A.D. 700 and 750, when the area was resettled and the passages were
used as living quarters.

Knowth is more irregular in appearance than Newgrange, but at least as impressive
"It's amazing when you come across the inscriptions, there's something about them that brings
you face to face with people," a scholar from University College, Dublin, Francis J. Byrne,
told The Irish Times in 2008. "If you met them, you would probably be telling them off,
don't be desecrating this monument." Investigation into the complexities of Knowth and
how it has been repurposed over the last 6,000 years is continuing.
Experts are beginning to agree that Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth once served as astronomical
monuments, noting their level of sophistication. Archaeologists rejected these ideas as
fantasies for a long time, interpreting the orientation of the passages at Newgrange and
Knowth as coincidental and the incised stones as a set of meaningless geometric designs.
In his 2012 book,
Newgrange,
Monument to Immortality, the Drogheda journalist and novelist Anthony Murphy points
out that Neolithic farmers would have had many reasons to pay attention to weather, seasons
and the passage of time. He also observes that they would be much more likely to pay close
attention to the moon and the stars than we do, with our electric lights and internet data.
He considers Newgrange and Knowth epic calendars that measured years, leap years and other temporal cycles.
I widened my range a little - there was so much to see, both in terms of landscape and
of historical structures. In
Monasterboice, six miles north of
the river, there is a circular tower and a crowded graveyard containing the oldest known Celtic cross, still in beautiful condition.

Monasterboice circular tower and graveyard containing the oldest known Celtic cross
Not far from Collon - four miles from Monasterboice - are the remains of an enormous abbey from
the 12th century (
Old Mellifont), simultaneously neat, airy and spooky.

Old Mellifont Abbey | Ireland's first Cistercian monastery founded in the 12th century
There are towns (Donore, Navan) and castles (
Trim, from the Norman
period, and Slane, reconstructed in the 18th century, now the site of big rock concerts). There is Drogheda itself.

Trim Castle in the Boyne Valley
But Newgrange is the beginning - DNA analysis and archaeological evidence indicate that
farming in the region began somewhere around 4500 B.C. It may have been that farmers from
the Middle East came up the river in those log boats, discovered the unusual fertility of
the valley (a result of the last ice age) and encountered an entrenched indigenous population.
But there are no signs of a conflict; either the Neolithic farmers mixed peacefully with the
Mesolithic foragers, or the foragers themselves imported agriculture, took those log boats
to the east and returned. It was the farmers, having cleared the land and harvested their
crops, who had the leisure time to build one passage tomb after another, Mr. Murphy suggested.
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.
Newgrange and the Valley of the Boyne are north and west of Dublin - driving a
car to Drogheda takes between 30 and 40 minutes, and the bus takes about 50 minutes.
Drogheda is about halfway between Dublin airport and the border of Northern Ireland.
There are tours to the Neolithic sites, but the freedom of roaming the Valley of the Boyne is inspiring, too.
Newgrange has a modern and very informative
visitors' center, which
should not be missed.
The Battle of the Boyne Visitors Center,
also informative, is in a renovated building, with a wonderful view over the
valley, and a beautiful formal garden, as well as a restaurant and a gift shop.
Based on an article by Jane Smiley printed in the New York Times on December 25th 2016.
Private Driver Day Tour
to Newgrange the UNESCO World Heritage site, the Hill of Tara a Celtic Royal site, Monasterboice 10th
century round tower and high crosses and the Hill of Slane where St. Patrick lit the Paschal Fire
in the 5th century. Personalised service with collection at your hotel or cruise ship by Sedan or
Mercedes MPV in the Dublin / Meath / Louth area. Airport collection or drop off can be included as part of the tour.
Take a suggested tour of the Boyne Valley or we can collaborate with you to design a custom Boyne Valley Day Tour.