Newgrange
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- DNA from a skull in the most elaborate chamber showed that the man's parents were first-degree relatives, probably brother and sister.
- The mound holds about 200,000 tonnes of material, mostly pebbles gathered from terraces of the nearby River Boyne.
- The white quartz of the facade came from the Wicklow Mountains about 50 km south, and the dark granite cobbles from the Mourne Mountains about 50 km north.
- None of the 547 great slabs were quarried: they are naturally weathered stones collected and hauled, largely uphill, to the site.
- Five thousand years ago the solstice light entered exactly at sunrise and reached the chamber's back wall; Earth's slow wobble now delays it by about four minutes.
- According to Irish myth, the god Dagda made the sun stand still here, a tale some scholars read as a memory of the solstice illumination.
- The entrance stone, carved with spirals, is about three metres long and weighs some five tonnes.
- The tomb was rediscovered in 1699 when a local landowner had labourers dig into the mound for building stone.
- Pendants made from Roman gold coins of the early 4th century AD were left around the mound, showing it was still a place of offerings 3,000 years later.
- Its modern name comes from a medieval farm, the 'new grange', belonging to the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont.
Why it is worth it
Newgrange is a Neolithic passage tomb on a rise above the River Boyne in County Meath, built around 3100 BC, several centuries before the Great Pyramid and the stone circle at Stonehenge. It is the best-known monument of Brú na Bóinne, the World Heritage landscape in a bend of the river that also includes the great tombs of Knowth and Dowth. The mound is about 85 metres across and 12 metres high, ringed by large kerbstones, many carved with spirals, lozenges and chevrons, and by the remains of a later circle of standing stones.
Its glittering front is a modern and much-argued reconstruction. During excavations from 1962 to 1975 Michael O'Kelly found a spread of white quartz and grey cobbles fallen from the mound's face, and rebuilt it as a vertical wall held by concrete; some archaeologists admire it, others have been scathing. Inside, a 19-metre passage lined with upright slabs leads to a cross-shaped chamber under a corbelled roof, with stone basins in its side recesses.
The famous moment comes around the winter solstice, when the rising sun enters through a "roof-box" above the doorway and lights the passage and chamber for about 17 minutes. O'Kelly was the first to see it in modern times, in 1967. Places inside at dawn are allocated by an annual lottery; on ordinary tours the guide recreates the effect with a lamp, and in the dark the chamber is still memorable.
Getting there
Access is only by guided tour starting from the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre at Donore, on the south bank of the Boyne, from where a shuttle crosses to the tomb. Newgrange is about 8 km west of Drogheda; Dublin Airport (DUB) is roughly 33 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Newgrange is a prehistoric monument in County Meath in Ireland, placed on a rise overlooking the River Boyne, eight kilometres west of the town of Drogheda. It is an exceptionally grand passage tomb built during the Neolithic Period, around 3100 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. Newgrange is the main monument in the Brú na Bóinne complex, a World Heritage Site that also includes the passage tombs of Knowth and Dowth, as well as other henges, burial mounds and standing stones.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
53.69473, -6.47557per Wikidata