Newgrange is a Neolithic passage tomb in the Boyne valley, older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, built so precisely that once a year the rising midwinter sun reaches its innermost chamber.
The passage tomb
Constructed around 3200 BCE, Newgrange is a great mound roughly 85 metres across, faced with a wall of white quartz and surrounded by a kerb of large decorated stones. A single stone-lined passage runs about 19 metres into the mound to a cruciform chamber with a corbelled roof that has kept the interior dry for over five thousand years. It formed part of the wider Bru na Boinne complex, which also includes the comparable tombs of Knowth and Dowth.
The solstice light
Above the entrance is a specially built opening, the roof-box. For a few mornings around the winter solstice, and only then, a beam of sunrise light passes through this box, travels the length of the passage and illuminates the floor of the burial chamber for some minutes before withdrawing. The alignment is deliberate and finely calculated, tying the monument to the death and return of the year at its darkest point. Cremated and unburnt human remains were found in the chamber; the tomb was a place of the dead and, it appears, of periodic ritual return.
Myth and modern access
In later Irish tradition the Boyne tombs became the dwellings of the Tuatha De Danann and gods such as the Dagda and Aengus, an entirely separate mythology laid over the far older monuments. Excavated and restored in the twentieth century, Newgrange is a World Heritage site; demand to witness the solstice event is so high that places inside the chamber are allocated by public lottery.