NEWGRANGE

IRELAND

One of a cluster of Neolithic passage graves in the Boyne Valley in eastern Ireland. Newgrange is the largest of them. It consists of a huge round mound 36 feet (11m) high and 295 feet (90m) across, its edge marked by a kerb of large, roughly worked boulders laid end to end. A fantastically decorated slab on the south-eastern side is the blocking stone of the entrance passage, made of upright slabs supporting a slab roof The passage leads to a central chamber with small burial chambers leading off it.

In the Neolithic, the bodies of the dead were allowed to decompose in mortuary enclosures, then, after an interval, the bones were gathered and put into the tomb.

A special feature of Newgrange is the roof box, a specially made “letter box” above the tomb’s entrance. Even when the doorway was filled with blocking stones, as it usually would have been, light would have been able to penetrate into the tomb’s interior through the roof box. The alignment of the whole monument was carefully designed before it was built so that the first rays of the rising sun on the winter solstice would pass through the roof box all the way to the heart of the tomb. This was an extraordinary piece of architectural engineering, and it also shows how important the passage of the seasons must have been in the minds of the people who carried it out. The middle of winter is the low point of the year, in a sense the death of the year, and the tomb-builders made the life-giving, life-renewing sun shine briefly into the tomb at just that moment, to re-awaken the land and start the new year. Perhaps also the hope was that this magic would reawaken the dead and launch them into their new lives.