After our very first trip in 1988, we were hooked! But especially hooked on Ireland, the land of Herself’s beginnings – well, a fair old chunk of her beginnings anyway. And while I don’t have nary a drop of green blood, I was just as afflicted, had to have a decent look.
So we ate mince and pasta for three years to save up so we could do it all over again, and in the meantime I jumped into a whole bunch of research into Irish history. So we’d know what we were looking at. And one of the first things we fell over was a big glossy touristy brochure pic of Newgrange. Ancient monument extraordinaire. After a couple of great days in Dublin, we hit the road north...
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Sun 12th May 1991
We stick to the small back roads out of Kells, through Slane, on east a while on the Drogheda road above the Valley of the Boyne, past lots of big properties. There looks to be plenty of money out here, nice farms generally, with a mixture of house styles, new and old, traditional and contemporary, and in the towns too. You can’t help but wonder how the brave new world of the Greater Europe EEC will affect their lives and their livelihoods. And will membership to the New Europe only be gained at the cost of some loss of national identity for these smaller countries?
We stooge along slow and easy, finally cut back down towards the Boyne to Newgrange, the magnificent burial chamber that is the centre-piece of an extensive series of Neolithic things right along this valley, not unlike the barrows and henges and circles of Wessex.
Have to admit that neither of us had ever heard of Newgrange – like most people – we just stumbled over a feature on it in some travel section of a paper, a writer’s account of the very moving experience of attending the Winter Solstice dawn event in the burial chamber that’s deep in this ancient passage tomb, when sunlight momentarily shafts into it. Whole idea of that fired our imagination, we did lots of research, and here we are.
They think Newgrange was built between about 3300 and 2900BC, making it over five thousand years old - roughly contemporary with the very earliest stages of Stonehenge - which puts it more than five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt! Even predates the later Stonehenge trilithons by a good thousand years.
It consists of a vast stone and turf mound covering about an acre, 250ft across and 40ft high and totally man-made, inside a circle of 97 large kerbstones and then topped by a high inward-leaning wall of white quartz and granite. BIG project! But oddly enough, considering its size, it’s been ‘hidden’ for about the last four thousand years due to mound slippage, up till the late 1600s when men looking for building stone uncovered it, first thinking it was just a cave in a small hill.
We pull in at two minutes to two, just as the first busload rolls up and the doors open, pay our quid fifty each and get in the first tour batch. We are all colour-coded with a small stick-on patch, red, green, or blue, three lots of twenty, which is not a bad way of keeping the traffic down to environmentally friendly numbers, sixty only through the turnstiles into the grounds, and only one batch of twenty at a time gets into the chamber itself for the guided tour. Then the guides do one big briefing on the historical background out at the front of this huge barrow, and it’s a matter of amusing yourself till your colour comes up – wander about the grounds in the cold blustery wind, take plenty of outside pics and video - but they tell us that no photography or video is allowed inside. An environment issue? Or copyright? Maybe even more importantly, to preserve the mystique?
Finally (last again!) it’s Red’s turn and our batch of twenty squeeze along the narrow passage in single file - it goes about a third of the way into the heart of the barrow - a long, straight, slowly rising gallery, but rather weirdly all natural light is quickly left behind, with only a few small, well-placed but hidden spotlights to throw odd shadows onto the strange spiral and circle carvings on the rock faces all around and overhead.
This is truly an incredible piece of design, AND civil engineering, to have the whole thing stay up all this time to begin with, but perfectly dry too, and not a cupful of any sort of mortar, simply huge stones laid and stood and placed and layered, to make this enigmatic last resting place of the rulers of a people today only known through myth and legend.
We finally congregate at the dead-end of the passage, which is the cross-shaped burial chamber itself, and has a high corbelled roof. And this is an even more awesome place, and SO eerie when they turn the lights off to talk in total darkness. And we do mean TOTAL darkness, literally can not see your hand in front of your face. And the young woman does the guide bit really well, tells us that in the recesses there used to be large stone basins and during excavation they found in them the cremated remains of just five individuals. And once a year, at the time of the winter solstice, the sun shines directly along the passage and into the chamber itself for about seventeen minutes as it rises, first experienced in modern times by a Professor O’Kelly on December 21, 1967. (A lottery is now held annually for the right to be allowed into the tomb to view the actual event. Would dearly love to win that one).
She says that the sun doesn’t actually enter the passage through the main entranceway as you’d expect, but through a specially contrived opening called a roofbox, directly ABOVE the entrance, and while the whole sun-once-a-year idea isn’t uncommon among passage graves, this is the only one to do it this way. Nowadays, there is actually a delay of four minutes from sunrise, but the boffins have calculated backwards to accommodate the slight shift in Earth’s axis since then, to show that when it was built it would’ve all come together right on sunrise. (How many generations of studying the Sun’s movements relative to the Earth did it take for these ‘primitive’ people to work all this out, let alone build it into this thing so accurately?!).
When it’s time to go I hang back in the dim light to be last, to be able to stand alone for a few seconds as the others file out, to be on my own in the burial chamber for an instant. The feeling is – presence? – it’s – no, I can’t even grasp at it, you’d have to be there, and do it for yourself. Easily one of the most profound moments of my life.
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