On the highest point of a low ridge overlooking the River Boyne is the best-known archaeological feature of Ireland: the passage tomb and solar observatory known as Newgrange. The construction of this magnificent site began about 3370 BCE. Newgrange is the oldest known astronomically-aligned structure in the world. It predates the first stage of Stonehenge in England by a thousand years and the construction of the Egyptian pyramids by 400 years.
Shown above is the River Boyne as it appears today.
For more than a thousand years, Newgrange was the ritual focus of one of the most sophisticated societies in Western Europe. Then, about 2045 BCE, ritual activity at the site came to an end and the tomb was no longer maintained.
Newgrange is an example of a Neolithic passage grave which includes a roughly circular earthen mound under which there is a chamber and a passage leading to it. In Ireland, about 10% of the passage graves are oriented toward significant astronomical events.
The site occupied by Newgrange actually encloses the remains of an earlier tomb. This earlier tomb, which appears to have been made of turves, may have been 35 metres (about 115 ft.) in diameter.
The Monument Today:
As today’s tourists begin their walk up the hill to the ancient tomb, their eyes are drawn to the white quartz wall that rises almost three meters in height and is almost vertical. This controversial wall was constructed between 1967 and 1974 following two decades of archaeological investigations. A committee was established by the Irish Tourist Board in 1961 to undertake the restoration of the site. The committee selected Cork archaeologist Professor M.J. O’Kelly to lead the project.
The principal aim of the committee was to make the tomb’s passage accessible to tourists and to expose the decorated kerbstones around the circumference of the mound. In the five millennia since Newgrange had initially been constructed, material had slipped down from the mound and across the kerb. Excavations revealed a layer of quartz in front of the kerb. While there were some who believed that the quartz had been laid out as a terrace in front of the kerbstones, O’Kelly felt that they had formed an impressive wall above the kerbstones.
Shown above is an aerial view of the monument which is displayed in the Interpretive Centre.
To implement O’Kelly’s interpretation of the quartz stones, a massive reinforced concrete wall was erected behind the kerbstoness along the southeastern front of Newgrange. The quartz was embedded into the concrete and steel structure and the rounded granite boulders were set into it at random, like currants in a quartz scone.
Archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Matthew Stout, in their book Newgrange, write:
“The quartz wall inflicted a 1960s’ standard of office-block design upon a structure that had stood for five thousand years and had been a ruin for four thousand of them. It was the last time in Ireland that scientific opinion, no matter how well founded, and a modern aesthetic would be allowed to impinge so forcefully on the ancient. If it were done again, the current approach to the presentation of ancient monuments would have seen Newgrange restored as unobtrusively as possible; accessible yes, but a ruin.”
Internationally, the reconstruction of Newgrange is considered one of the world’s worst archaeological reconstructions.
Original Construction of Newgrange:
Before the people who built Newgrange ever placed the first stone, they already had a mental plan for the structure as a monument to the dead and a solar observatory. This was no haphazard construction, but a well-planned, well-designed monument.
The mound at Newgrange is not perfectly circular: it measures 78.6 meters (258 ft.) across from northwest to southeast, and 85.3 meters(280 ft.) across from northeast to southwest. It stood to a height of between 10.9 and 13.4 meters (36 and 44 ft.).
The mound itself is primarily a cairn of loose stones, each larger in size than a fist. There are an estimated 200,000 tonnes (221,000 tons) of these stones in the mound. These were then covered with thick layers of turves. The turves were laid in strips from rolled-up turf which was brought to the mound in the same manner as turf is transported and re-laid by today’s landscape gardeners. The turves laid over the cairn of stones gave stability to the mountain of loose material. ). It is estimated that it would have taken 400 individuals about 30 years to gather and transport the material and to construct the mound.
Stripping the turf from the farmland in the area meant that the builders were willing to compromise the fertility of this land. Archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Matthew Stout write:
“This is a remarkable step for a society to take whose prosperity was founded on the productivity of the land. Thus the passage tomb at Newgrange conceivably represents both the apogee of a civilization and the origins of its demise.”
The stone material used in the construction of Newgrange was not local. The quartz stones, which contain distinctive white mica flecks, are found only in the Wicklow Mountains far to the south. The granite boulders originated in the Mourne Mountains and obtained their distinctive round shape as the glaciers swept them south and deposited them in the Cooley peninsula to the north of Newgrange.
The people who built Newgrange transported the quartz and the granite boulders in boats made of hazel and willow rods covered with cattle hide. The boats transported their loads along the coast and then up the Boyne River: 70 kilometers (43 miles) for the quartz and 40 kilometers (24 miles) for the granite.
While Newgrange is a distinctive Irish monument, it also shows influence from contemporary European peoples. The passage graves in Brittany on the European mainland show many of the architectural features which are found at Newgrange and at the other passage tombs in the Boyne valley. Construction of passage tombs in Brittany began about 4200 BCE and construction of these tombs continued until about 3500 BCE. Newgrange was constructed between 3370 BCE and 2920 BCE.
Some archaeologists have also pointed out that the decorated stone basins found in the chamber are associated with objects and art forms from the Iberian Peninsula.
Kerbstones:
Lining the outside of the tomb are 97 kerbstones. These stones vary greatly in their appearance: some are highly decorated slabs, while others are simply blocks of angular rock. One interesting feature of the kerbstones, however, is that the top of the kerbstones are all about one metre above the ground creating a horizontal line around the tomb. Taller stones were set deeper in the ground to retain a uniform height. Shorter kerbstones were raised up on boulders to bring them up to height.
Each of the kerbstones weighs between two and five tonnes (2.2 and 5.5 tons). If all of the kerbstones were placed end to end they would stretch for 270 metres (886 ft.) and they would weigh more than 300 tonnes (331 tons). Archaeologists have estimated that quarrying and transporting these stones would have been the equivalent to the erection of the vault of a gothic cathedral.
The kerbstones are a type of stone which geologists call greywackle. The source of these stones is Clogher Head, which is 30 kilometers (18 mi.) away, down the Boyne River and a short distance up the coast. Once the builders of Newgrange had transported these heavy stones the 30 kilometers to the area of the site, it was then necessary to drag these great blocks of stone about a kilometre (over one-half mile) from the river to the tomb. This also meant dragging them up the 60 metre (197 ft.) slope from the edge of the river to the tomb. Archaeologists have suggested that moving these stones might have been achieved through the use of sleds, or rolling them across logs, or perhaps rolling them across round stones.
The Chamber:
At the entrance to the passage that leads to the chamber within the tomb is a large stone which forms the spiritual boundary between the living and the dead. The entrance stone is carved with a triple spiral. Each spiral is slightly larger than the next, made of a double coil set in an anti-clockwise direction. There is a deep vertical groove which runs halfway through the center of the stone. This divides the upper half of the decoration in two. The design on the right is more free-flowing and bolder than that on the left. This deep vertical groove becomes a pair of spirals set in a clockwise direction.
Overall, the design suggests that the artists drew on an imagery of ritualized altered states of consciousness. While archaeologists acknowledge that no-one knows exactly what the artists were trying to convey, one experiment with hallucinogens produced pen-and-ink drawings very similar to the combined spirals and lozenges carved into the entrance stone.
The passageway was made using large vertical stones to form the walls with flat stones laid across them. The passageway leading to the chamber is also decorated and the decorations become more intense as the passageway nears the chamber. The passageway climbs about two metres (7 ft.) from the entrance to the chamber. The top of the entrance is at the same height as the floor of the chamber.
The photographs of the rebuilding of the tomb show the basic construction of the passageway with megaliths supporting a large capstone.
The chamber is a corbelled vault that is 6 metres (20 feet) high. The corbelled roof was constructed so that the stones slanted downwards. This means that water would run down and away from the structure. The chamber is capped with a massive horizontal slab which does not have a natural slope. To drain the water away, the builders cut water grooves into the megalith. They also packed the crevices with a putty made from burnt soil and sea sand.
The floor plan of the chamber is a cruciform. There are three recesses off the common central space. This central space, which is covered by the corbelled roof, has an irregular pentagonal shape which is never less than 2.5 metres (8 ft.) in width.
Note on Terminology:
Since this is an Irish archaeological site, I have used Irish spellings and measurements in describing it.