Newgrange...and leprechauns!

When you are living only an hour away from a Neolithic monument that is older than the pyramids and Stone Henge, it is certainly worthy of a visit - and so we headed off to Newgrange last Saturday. The monument is known as Brú Na Bóinne (the Boyne Palace) after the Boyne river which runs nearby. It was built in the new stone age period over 5000 years ago and it is amazing to see what people were able to build at that time.

Brú Na Bóinne is basically a burial site - but only for the most important of people of that time. It is a passage tomb so you enter through a small passage which you can see below. The outer walls are made of white stone (quartz) with small granite boulders and it is topped by a grassy dome. It is 80m in diameter and 13m high. Our guide explained to us that most of the stones used to build Newgrange are not local and would have had to be transported from up to 40km away  - some of the larger ones would have taken days to move into place. It is estimated that Newgrange took about 30 years to build, and given that the life expectancy of the people of that time was only about 30 years old, it would have taken generations to build it. 

Over time, the white stone walls collapsed and had to be rebuilt. Below is the entrance way to the tomb. The granite you can see below has been added in recent times (as have the wooden stairs!). When it was originally built the white stones would have reached right up to the large entrance stones at the opening of the tomb.

 

 The entrance stone above is very famous for its carvings - part of the Neolithic art tradition. This stone was believed to be a barrier between the living and the dead and people would have had to climb over it to enter into the tomb.Today we walked up the wooden stairs and then down to the entrance. Inside the tomb, the passage was is very small and narrow - they obviously were not large people at that time! The you come into the inner chamber which is where the bones and ashes of the dead (they were burnt beforehand) were places. The originally stones and carvings are still there, as it a lot of graffiti of names and dates carved into the stones from the 1800's and 1900's - when the monument was open to the public with little regulation.

What I found most fascinating is how the monument acted as a type of calender for that time. The tomb and the entrance passage are designed so that each year, only at the time of the winter solstice, the rising sun shines through the light box (which is that small little box you can see above the entrance way) and lights up the passage way and the main chamber for about 17 minutes. Our guide turned off all the lights when we were in the inside chamber and showed a recreation of what this would be like. You can enter a lottery to actually win tickets to be there for the real event in December. There are 6 days around December 21 when the sunlight will enter the chamber. We have put our names into the lottery, however last year 30,000 people entered and only 24 places are allocated each day - so I don't like our chances. It also depends on whether it's a sunny day!

There are many theories as to why the people of that time would have designed the tomb so that the sunlight would enter just on those few days of the year. I just think it is amazing that they would have been able to design and build such a huge structure, so long ago, and have it work so perfectly! Some people think that the sunlight was a way of re-energising the dead who were buried here - a way of looking after the spirits. It is also suggested that this acted as a type of calender for these people - a sign that the longest night was over and that it wouldn't be long before the spring arrived.

As you walk around the tomb, you can see smaller burial mounds (there is one in the photo below) and standing stones.

 

Below are some photos of the outside walls of the tomb as we walked all the way around it. You can see some more carvings on some of the outer stones.

 The girls thought this one looked a bit like an owl.

 

The  Brú Na Bóinne visitor's reconstructed elements of the daily life of the people who would have been alive at the time that Brú Na Bóinne was built. Their stone age period was the beginning of farming as a way of life (rather than just hunting) and their houses are believed to looked like the one above. 

On our way home we also stopped at the Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre and battle site, which is where King William of III of Orange fought and won over King James II to gain control of Ireland and England.  This battle was fought on the field you see below and one of the reasons it is so important in Irish history is that it became a focal point for Protestants in Northern Ireland - as King William was a Protestant and King James was a Catholic. As James explains - this battle was like a Gallipoli for the Protestants (only they won) - it is the heart of their identity and civic nationalism (...you can tell these are James's words and not mine!!)

 

The next day, back in Dublin, James happily headed off to fulfill a life-long dream of attending a 6 Nations Rugby Match - Ireland vs England. Unfortunately, the outcome was not to his liking (nor to the rest of Ireland's) but he did enjoy the great atmosphere of Landsdowne Road!  (The highlight of my week was popping in as I was passing by Trinity College to see the Book of Kells - there was hardly anyone there and I got to take my time looking at the beautifully illustrated pages - but more on the Book of Kells in another post.)

 
Today the girls' and I made the most of their mini Half-Term Break and visited the National Leprechaun museum where we were told many stories about leprechauns, faeries and banshees! We also got to pretend that we were leprechauns by sitting on oversize chairs......

 finding a pot of gold.................

and making a wish in a wishing well.

 There were other ways to pretend to be leprechauns as well...as you can see below!

 Pia and Ella finished off the tour by drawing their own leprechaun pictures which were then proudly hung in the Leprechaun Gallery at the museum!

Tomorrow we are also making the most of the Half-Term break to do a short trip away to Kilkenny so I will report back to you about that trip in my next post.