Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries

high wall of white quartz. The large slab which now stands against the wall outside the passage entrance was originally used to block the passage when construction of the tomb was complete. The 62 foot long passageway, covering only a third of the length of the mound, is lined with roughly hewn stone slabs, and leads to a cross-shaped chamber with a magnificant steep corbelled roof, 19 feet in height. The recesses in the cruciform chamber are decorated with spirals and contain three massive stone basins, two carved from sandstone and one from granite, which archaeologists think once contained cremated human remains.
It was not until 1699, when the overgrown hill of Newgrange was being used as a source of small stones to
build a nearby road, that the Newgrange passage tomb was rediscovered. One of the first people to enter the tomb, which he described as a cave, was Welsh antiquary and one time keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Edward Lhuyd (1660-1709). He made the first study of Newgrange, which consisted of descriptions and drawings that were published in 1726 by Thomas Molyneux. In 1909, George Coffey, Keeper of Irish Antiquities in the National Museum, Dublin, catalogued numerous Passage Graves including Newgrange, which he published in 1912 as "New Grange and other Incised Tumuli in Ireland." However, it was not until 1962 that the first major excavations at the site took place under Professor Michael J. O'Kelly from the Department of Archaeology, University College, Cork. During a program of excavation which lasted from 1962 to 1975, the massive passage grave underwent extensive restoration, including the rebuilding of the supposedly original facade of sparkling white quartz using stones found at the site. This restoration, however, has not been without its critics, who see it as a 20th century view of how someone thought the building would have appeared c. 3200 B.C.
© Government of Ireland
Interior of the monument, showing megalithic art.
It has been estimated that the Newgrange Passage Tomb contains around 200,000 tons of material and would have taken 300 workers a minimum of 20 to 30 years to construct. Rounded stones from the River Boyne were used in the construction, but the white quartz pebbles used as facing stones come from the Wicklow Mountains, 50 miles away, and were probably brought by boat down the Boyne. The large slabs of rock which make up the walls and ceiling of the passageway were probably transported on wooden rollers from a quarry 8.7 miles away. This huge investment in time and labor indicates a socially advanced and well-organized people, as well as a society of superb craftsmen.
The Passage Graves of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth are justly famous for their wealth of megalithic (c. 4500 B.c.-1500 B.C.) rock art. In fact, Knowth alone contains a quarter of all the known megalithic art in Europe. At Newgrange, several of the stones inside the monument are decorated with spiral patterns and cup and ring marks, as are some of the kerbstones. Many of these stones are carved on their hidden sides so as not to be visible to anyone in the tomb. But the most spectacular piece of megalithic art is on the superb slab lying outside the entrance to the tomb. This recumbent stone is profusely decorated with lozenge motifs and one of the few known examples of a triple spiral, the other two examples being inside the monument. Such motifs are found on stones in other passage tombs on the Isle of Man and the island of Anglesey in North Wales. Although these motifs were also used in later Celtic art, it is not known what they represent, though perhaps they recorded astronomical and cosmological observations.
Surrounding the Newgrange mound is a ring of 12 upright stones up to 8 feet in height. Originally, there were perhaps around 35 of these standing stones, but they have been removed or destroyed over time. Representing the final building stage at the site, the circle was erected around 2000 B.C., long after the great passage
tomb had gone out of use, although its presence shows that the area itself still retained some importance for the local population, perhaps connected with astronomy or ancestor worship.
Newgrange is perhaps most famous for a spectacular phenomena that occurs at the site every year for a few days around the 21st or 22nd of December. The entrance to the Newgrange passage tomb consists of a doorway composed of two standing stones and a horizontal lintel. Above the doorway is an aperture known as the roof box or light box. Every year, shortly after 9 a.m. (on the morning of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year) the sun begins its ascent across the Boyne Valley over a hill known locally as Red Mountain, the name probably taken from the color of the sunrise on this day. The newly risen sun then sends a shaft of sunlight directly through the Newgrange light box, which penetrates down the passageway as a narrow beam of light illuminating the central chamber at the back of the tomb. After just 17 minutes the beam of light narrows and the chamber is once more left in darkness.
This spectacular event was not rediscovered until 1967 by Professor Michael J. O'Kelly, though it had been known about in local folklore before that time. Newgrange is one of only three known sites with such light boxes, the other two being Cairn G, at Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery, County Sligo, Ireland, and the passage tomb at Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey, North Wales. There may possibly be a fourth, at a chambered tomb at Crantit on the island of Orkney, Scotland, discovered in 1998, but this is still disputed. Newgrange, however, is by far the best constructed and the most complex of these sites, and reveals in spectacular fashion the highly developed knowledge of surveying and astronomy possessed by the Neolithic inhabitants of the area. It also illustrates that for the people who aligned their monument with the winter solstice,