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Thursday, Nov 28,
2002
From Belfast we
headed south, Dublin being our final destination, but not
before stopping at a site some 30 miles north and about 5000
years in the past: the mythical Bru na Boinne, the valley of
the river Boyne, with its famous tomb of Newgrange.
The great
passage tomb of Newgrange looms like a mighty king on its
throne,
knightly menhirs (standing stones) in attendance, overlooking
the Boyne River Valley below.
Nov. 28, 2002
Built around the
year 3000 B.C.E., Newgrange is an excellent example of a
passage tomb: it is a giant mound of earth covering a very
narrow stone-lined passageway that leads into a cross-shaped
chamber some 60 feet into the man-made hill. The tomb is
actually older than the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, and
about the oldest thing we have seen in our travels; in fact,
except for the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, we really
cannot think of anything older still standing today,
destroying all of our modern world's preconceptions about the
"simplicity" of stone-age peoples.
The visitor's center
at Bru na Boinne is excellent, providing a handy exhibition on
stone-age life and technology, a replica of Newgrange and
several good publications for those wanting more info. We
picked up one of them, and headed to wait for the bus, which
took us all the way to the tomb site. You can tell the place
is a favorite with tourists, local and international, because
in the middle of November, the groups were still about 15-20
people and constantly arriving. Lots of school children milled
about that day, probably one or two schools taking their
students on a field trip. It was actually really funny,
because once our guide, a petite young woman, began to talk to
us a bunch of elementary school-age children started to run
around the area, making it impossible for us to hear her, so
she turned around and yelled at them in Irish, telling them
(she told us afterwards, it's not like we understood it) to
stop running and go back with their teacher. Their faces were
priceless!
The
entrance to the tomb and the skybox. The tell-tale swirly glyphs
of
Newgrange still baffle scientists, who have no idea what they
could possibly
mean. Take note of the skybox above the entrance (it will come in handy below).
Nov. 28, 2002
A few moments later
our guide lead us inside the tomb. The passage is incredibly
narrow; people had to take off their backpacks, and big people
(like Danny) had to watch out for their head and stomach. The
passage stones are decorated diamonds, chevrons and with more
of the tell-tale swirly designs found all over Newgrange (like
on the entrance stone above). The ceiling stones also have a
shallow grove running the length of the passage in order to
route water out of the tomb thus keeping it dry. Once again,
no mortar was used to stick the stones together; it is only by
sheer excellent engineering that the whole place is stable an
does not collapse under the 200,000 tons of stone and dirt
above it.
We reached the
cross-shaped inner chamber, where even more decorations
awaited us. In fact, our guide pointed out to us, some of the
decorations were obscured by overlapping stones, meaning the
stone had been decorated before being put into place in the
tomb. She next explained to us about Newgrange's little light
show every Winter Solstice: on or around Dec. 21 (and
actually, for a few days before and after as well, though not
with the same intensity as on the solstice), when the sun
rises over the horizon, sunlight filters through the skybox
above the entrance (see above), shooting a thin shaft of light
all the way to the inner chamber. For the next 17 minutes, the
ray of light moves and gains in intensity, giving the chamber
enough illumination to be able to read and discern colors, as
the guide told us. She herself had witnessed the event three
times before, and we all envied her. She did the second best
thing for us, though. After a warning, she turned off all the
electric lights inside the tomb, leaving us in absolute pitch
darkness--the kind of darkness you can feel pressing against
you. Then the electric facsimile of the light show began, and
while only a pale imitation of the real event, it was enough
to awe every single one of us.
Newgrange
has watched over Ireland for 5300 years, still hiding
many of her secrets from modern peoples, silently watching
history unfold.
Nov. 28, 2002
Newgrange humbled us
all. Five thousand years ago, stone-age people had found a way
to engineer this massive structure, bringing building material
from miles around (the white quartz stones you see above come
all the way from the Wicklow Mountains, some 40 miles south),
and tuning it with exact precision to a natural event that
only comes once a year, all without the aid of mathematics, at
least as we know it today. Knowth, the second of three passage
tombs on the Boyne Valley, is also attuned to a cyclical
celestial event, with two passages each calibrated to allow
light to reach the inner chamber of the tomb on the Spring and
Fall Equinoxes in much the same way as Newgrange. Though we
have absolutely no idea what the purpose of these tombs
(beyond the obvious) were, especially in regards to the
attunement to these times of the year, we can nonetheless
marvel at the legacy these peoples left us. In a time when
technology is pervasive and it's so easy to be lost in the
chaos of modernity, Newgrange reminds us that for thousands of
years people lived close to nature, in harmony with nature,
and mindful of nature. It does not mean that we must now live
like they did as well, but it is a lesson we should all take
with us. After all, we inhabit the very same world the
builders of Newgrange inhabited. They left us Newgrange for us
to learn; what will we leave the generations of 5000 years in
the future?
Next: Dublin
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