NEWGRANGE

We landed in Dublin on a Tuesday and made the arrangements for renting (the Irish call it "hire") a car. We were given a Ford Fiesta with a manual transmission. We hadn't driven with a manual transmission for about 10 years, and we had never driven on the left. So we were a little apprehensive, and we paid for the extra insurance. The good thing was that all of the luggage fit in the trunk (the boot) except for the camera bag, which was convenient. We had planned to visit Newgrange and then drive down to Trim and spend the night in a B & B recommended by a tour book we had. Even though the airport was north of Dublin (Baile Atha Cliath in the Gaelic), somehow we got lost and ended up in central Dublin. Many of the main national roads go into central Dublin (they kind of radiate out of the city), so when we saw a sign for the highway we wanted we headed for it.

Newgrange is one of three large burial mounds in this area. It is the only one in the area that allows people to walk inside. No photography is allowed inside the mound. In the above picture, you can see the door to the right, and there are people walking around it. They will give you an idea of how big Newgrange is. The passage into the interior gets to be very narrow at certain points, and you have to turn sideways in order to make it through. At the end of the passage is a central chamber around which are three chambers -- one straight ahead, one to the left, and one to the right.

     Above is a picture of the door. In front of the door is a large stone with petroglyphs carved into it. There are stairways on either side of this stone which are used to gain access to the interior.
     Newgrange was built around 3200 BC, around 500 years before the pyramids of Giza. One amazing feature of Newgrange is that at dawn on the Winter Solstice, the beams of the sun will light up the interior chambers of the mound for about 17 minutes. This effect occurs for a shorter period on the two days before and the two days after the day of the Winter Solstice. The guide was able to give us a demonstration using some lighting that is set up along the passageway.
     No one really knows what the petroglyphs mean. There is one theory that the three circles on the left represent the three main large burial mounds in the area, and the other circles represent smaller burial mounds that are below in the valley. Another view is that they represent the number of days on which the sun pierces the interior of the mound.

Above is a picture of the carved stone that is used for a lintel stone over the door.

The mound is partially restored. The interior and main entry was left untouched, but the white wall around the front of the mound is a recreation using material that was laying around the front of the mound. You can see that the facing uses white and dark grey stones. The archaeologist who restored it thought that the white stones (a kind of white quartz) would have been used this way. Now there is disagreement. Some archaeologists think that the white stones would have been used in a special pathway on which a procession that carried the body of some important person would follow up to the mound. The same kinds of stones are found at the other two large burial mounds in the area, and at one of the mounds the archaeologists are attempting to use them to configure some kind of processional path. Personally, I don't like any kind of restoration. It is unfortunate that people in the past didn't treasure the sites, but restoring a site to what one person's vision of what it looked like in the past is not good either.

Some of the larger stones that are around the base of the mound still have their petroglyphs easily visible.