Newgrange, Bru na Boinne

It is impossible to fully explain or describe Newgrange or Knowth. I have wanted to visit Newgrange for 30 years, since Morwen and I tried to go there on our trip to Ireland and discovered that it was closed on Mondays (it’s not anymore). Newgrange is called Bru na Boinne, the Bend of the Boyne, and together with Knowth and Dowth and about 30 other, but smaller, cairns that were built within a large crescent arc of the river Boyne, they make up a complex of (photo= Newgrange with one of the 30 or so additional cairns in the area, this one very close to the river Boyne) burial cairns and ritual sites that boggles the mind.

Newgrange and Knowth are both so beautiful, built long before the great pyramids in Egypt (Knowth was built between 3300 and 2900 B.C; Newgrange was built just after that), and their art and architecture were innovative and spread throughout the British Isles and later to the continent. Knowth (shown here, with the large double-chamber passage tomb to teh rear, right, and additional tombs to the left) alone

has over 200 decorated boulders, out of the over 600 known decorated stones in Bru na Boinne; the decorated megaliths—large stones—at Knowth comprise about 45% of all known Irish tomb art and over a quarter of all the megalithic art in all of Europe. The decorations are inexplicable –though many have had theories, including that they are representations of Jungian archetypes arising during altered states of consciousness—and are mostly geometric designs of various sorts. Newgrange has at least 110 (decorated megaliths; they don’t know exactly how many there are, because many of the stones are only partially uncovered.

One of the most significant facts about the burial chambers at Bru na Boinne is that they all are oriented to some aspect of the solar calendar (the solstices and equinoxes, etc). Newgrange is amazingly designed, with an opening placed high up above the entrance tunnel, that the rising sun shines through ONLY at the Winter Solstice and a couple of days on either side. It creates a line of sunlight that is dazzling and that penetrates the great egg or womb of the tomb and would have touched the cremated remains of the dead that were left inside in special carved stone basins. ( We are standing in front of the entrance to the Newgrange passage tomb, with the actual entrance to the tunnel at ground level, and the "roof-box" through which the Winter Solstice rising sun shines above my head.)

The shining white quartz stones that are ON the outer wall of Newgrange and on the ground in a ring around the Knowth tomb seem to additionally separate the inner world of the sacred and the spiritual from the outer world of daily life.

We got to enter the Newgrange and Knowth passage graves, and they were awesome moments.

If you want to learn more about these incredible places, look online for them. There are many more photos there, including of the Winter Solstice sun rising through the Newgrange roof-box, along with lots of speculation.

By the way, we stayed in a great B&B just up the road about 3 minutes from Newgrange. It is Lougher Farm, in Donore, and is run by Patricia. While it is in a newer house, it is lovely, and not expensive. Patricia makes a great breakfast and can call ahead to the Bru na Boinne desk to reserve you a ticket (it’s the ONLY way to reserve a space on the coveted tours, and paying at Bru na Boinne is the ONLY way you can get to see the passage graves) Patrica’s call also gets you 20% off the ticket price. And believe me, you WANT to enter these places with a tour—you learn so much more, plus you get to actually go into the tombs. There is a wonderful exhibit at Bru na Boinne, too, with a video, and it all gives you a lot of explanation of how these spectacular monuments were built, who these Neolithic people were, what their lives were like, etc.

We sadly left Ireland, feeling that, even though it is such a small country, it is filled with so many ancient pre-Christian and early Christian sites, that we will have to make many more visits before we can feel that we have seen most—not all—of them.