Newgrange

Newgrange is a great Neolithic passage tomb on a rise above the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, about eight kilometres west of Drogheda. Farming communities built it around 3100 BCE by most estimates, which would make it older than both the Great Pyramid of Giza and Stonehenge in its present form, though some scholars place its construction a few centuries later. It is the chief monument of Brú na Bóinne, a ritual landscape that also contains the passage tombs at Knowth and Dowth, and it is famous for the way the rising sun lights its inner chamber at the winter solstice.

The mound is roughly 85 metres across and 12 metres high and is thought to contain about 200,000 tonnes of material, mostly river pebbles probably dug from terraces of the Boyne. It is ringed by large kerbstones, many carved with spirals, lozenges, chevrons and other designs; the entrance stone, with its linked spirals, is among the best-known pieces of megalithic art in Europe. A passage 19 metres long, lined with standing slabs, leads to a cross-shaped chamber with a high corbelled roof. Much of the stone was brought from far away: white quartz from the Wicklow Mountains and dark cobbles from the Mournes, both about 50 kilometres off.

Above the entrance is an opening known as the roofbox. For about 17 minutes around the winter solstice, the rising sun shines through it along the passage and lights the chamber floor. Michael O'Kelly, on 21 December 1967, became the first modern observer to record the event.

There is no agreement on what Newgrange was for, though most archaeologists believe it had religious meaning. Burnt and unburnt human bones and grave goods such as beads and pendants were found inside. O'Kelly saw it as a temple of a cult of the dead; others stress its solar alignment and read it, with similar tombs nearby, as a kind of calendar. A DNA study found that a man buried in the finest recess had parents who were close relatives, possibly siblings, which some researchers took as a sign of a ruling elite. Other archaeologists have criticised building a picture of a whole society on a single burial.

The tomb's first period of use lasted about a thousand years. By the early Bronze Age it had fallen out of use as a tomb; O'Kelly wrote that by 2000 BCE it was decaying, with people of the Beaker culture living around its edges and building timber circles nearby. The site still drew offerings much later: Roman gold coins of 320–337 CE, made into pendants, and Roman jewellery were left around the mound, objects that came from the Roman Empire. The builders are sometimes confused with the much later Celts, and the carvings wrongly called Celtic.

In medieval Irish literature the mound appears as Síd in Broga, a home of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine race of Irish myth, and especially of the Dagda and his son Aengus. One tale tells of the Dagda making the sun stand still, and some scholars have suggested it preserves a memory of the solstice event. After 1142 the land became part of the estates of the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont; its outlying farms were called granges, and a "new grange" appears in a document of 1348, giving the modern name.

In 1699 the landowner Charles Campbell, a Williamite settler, had labourers dig into the mound for stone, and they uncovered the entrance. The Welsh antiquarian Edward Lhwyd visited and described it, and many others followed. Most refused to believe that Ireland's own early inhabitants could have built it and credited it instead to the Vikings, Egyptians, Indians or Phoenicians.

In 1882 Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth were taken into state care, and conservation began in 1890. O'Kelly led the first thorough excavation from 1962 to 1975. Finding a spread of quartz stones before the mound, he concluded that they had formed a white facade, and he had it rebuilt as a steep wall held up by concrete. The reconstruction remains controversial; some critics argue that Neolithic builders could not have built a wall at such an angle. Brú na Bóinne was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1993, and Newgrange is now a popular visitor site, with access managed from a visitor centre.