Field Trip #2: Newgrange

After a fancy dinner and a stay in Barnacle's hostel, my class left Dublin and headed north to the Boyne Valley for a visit to Newgrange, a world heritage site.

Newgrange from a distance.

Newgrange is a passage tomb built in the Neolithic period.  Older than England's Stonehenge and the Giza Pyramid in Egypt, Newgrange has been a site of pilgrimage for thousands of years.  During excavations, Roman coins were found strewn around the mound, suggesting the fascination with the site even in the early centuries A.D.

To give you an idea of the tomb, it is 250 feet in diameter and covers just over an acre.  The inner passage stretches about a third of the way into the mound and then opens into a central chamber which has three smaller chambers surrounding it.   Under natural conditions, the chamber is pitch black, but on the winter solstice, the sun shines directly through a hole above the tomb's entrance, up the sloped passage, and illuminates the central chamber.

There's something indescribable about the majesty of Newgrange.  We can't know for sure what it was used for, but it's widely thought to have had religious significance.  Perhaps the neolithic people had a religious connection to the sun.  Our tour guide told a story of people who believed the winter solstice was a day of renewal and a day when the earth and the sun became one.

The entrance stone stands in front of the entrance and the roof box.

I am extremely lucky to have visited Newgrange.  Thomas had to book the trip seven months in advance.  As part of our visit, we got to enter the tomb and watch a demonstration of the winter solstice.  As the light crept up the passage, I got chills.  I can only imagine what it would feel like to stand in that passage during the solstice and experience the real thing.

No one who enters Newgrange would be able to say they don't feel something.  Whether it's simply amazement or it's a connection to something greater than yourself.  For me, it was just utter awe at the engineering capabilities and beautiful craftsmanship of a people who didn't have technology of any kind.  Not even the wheel.  Not even large mammals to help cart the stone, all of which had to be brought to the Boyne Valley.  There is no mortar, nothing to hold the inner chamber's beautiful vaulted ceiling together, nothing except the perfect selection of stone and the pressure of the mound above.

Words do not do it justice.  Pictures cannot do it justice.  It truly is and was something I had to experience, and I know I will remember it the rest of my life.

Slán agus beannacht leat.