MUST SEE ANTIQUITY IN IRELAND
Chichen Itza in the Yucatan seems old, built around 600 AD. Mesa Verde in Colorado only slightly younger, built about 650 AD. But Newgrange in Ireland beats them all, built around 3100 BC, making it older than even Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.
For our tour of Newgrange we expected an adventure. So, we took a car rental, a BMW with left hand stick shift on an right hand lane. We left the home of our County Meath host with the instructions, “Go down yer lane until you get to the woman in the brown dress and take a right.”
Somehow we made it on the two-lane route all the way to Newgrange.
A single perfect circular mound of earth rises 70 feet high. Nearly two acres in size, the protected UNESCO World Heritage Site has captured the imagination of archeologists and historians for centuries.
It was 1699 when a new landlord Charles Campbell discovered rubble of Newgrange. It would be another 100-plus years before scholars focused on the rise of land overlooking the River Boyne. Then from 1962 to 1975, Professor Michael J. O’Kelly excavated and restored Newgrange during the summer months.
The circular mound contains an inner stone passageway to a center chamber in the shape of a cross where cremated and unburned bones were discovered. For a handful of moments in the winter solstice, rays of the sun shone through a roofbox illuminating this inner chamber.
Estimates are that Newgrange took 300 workers 30 years to complete. Neolithic farmers who grew crops, raised cattle and had an interest in astrology built the monument.
But it’s the materials used that tell of the hurdles these workers faced. The 547 greywacke slabs used to wall the inner passage are believed to be from sites 3-12 miles away. The white quartz cobblestones are from 31 miles to the south and the dark rounded granodiorite cobbles from 31 miles to the north. It’s thought these stones were transported to Newgrange by boats on the River Boyne and then hauled uphill to the site of Newgrange.
Learn more at https://www.newgrange.com/