Loughcrew Tombs, 2

Continuing our visit to the Loughcrew Tombs...

Now outside, looking at some of the other tombs...there are
25 in all, some complete, some just traces

Interesting to run your fingers over designs your ancient fellows labored over,
6,000 years ago; making these designs was a matter of stone on stone, sometimes
incising with flint, sometimes just pecking away with a stone hammer and stone
chisel

Just before we were there, a small group of interestingly dressed younger persons
visited the area, singing, performing rites, and leaving offerings...

Vicki seated on the Witch's Chair

Looking toward the middle hill, more tombs

Another special place

Loughcrew Tombs, 1

On a ridge of hills some miles west of Bru na Boinne, but still in County Meath, are the Loughcrew Tombs, another of Ireland's 3 or 4 great megalithic centers. The tombs appear to me about midway in age between Carrowmore and Bru na Boinne: smaller undertakings, still passage tombs, often with a dolmen surrounded by a ring, but interestingly carved, and therefore more like their eastern neighbors than those to the west. Cairn T on Carnbane Hill East, is the largest specimen. It's a bit of a trudge climbing up to it, but it is more than rewarding. There are few people willing to make this trip, and you can easily have the place to yourself. OPW staff are helpful but more than willing to stay in their hut out of the fierce wind.

Carin T and a small ring neighbor to the left

The nice OPW ladies will let you borrow a torch if you forgot yours

Corballed ceiling, just like at Newgrange

Bru na Boinne, 2016: Knowth

We also visited Knowth in 2009, but did not post much. So here is a fraction of the megalithic art there, nearly all of it on the kerbs.

Knowth and two its satellites

Again, it's the very large curb stones that present the "art"

Here are just a few...there are a couple score, I guess, Knowth by far the major
concentration of megalithic art so far discovered

The environs

More rocks

The "sun dial" stone

Now inside the great tomb, looking at a side view

Comparison of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth

Knowth has the longest of all known megalithic corridors; interestingly, to me,
it is oriented toward the equinoxes, not the solstices, so that the sunrise of the
vernal equinox comes in one entrance, and the sunset of the autumnal equinox
comes in the other; so why the equinoxes? you ask...well, I guess, they didn't
have the Farmer's Almanac back then, and, especially if you were a novice
farmer, which everyone was, it would be good to know when to sow, when to
reap; I guess

Newgrange not far away

More rocks

More satellites

Special among the special places

Bru na Boinne, 2016: Newgrange

The bend in the River Boinne, County Meath, encloses one of the half dozen greatest of megalithic centers in the world, with Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, and scores of satellite structures. More than half of the megalithic art so far known resides within this bend. We visited in 2009, and I posted a brief account, http://roadeveron.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/bru-na-boinne.html, which I can not improve upon, except by quantity of pix.

Newgrange at a distance, driving by; the white facing is quartz, from the
Wicklow Mountains, 50 miles away; must have been valued for something...
perhaps its luminescence...Newgrange is all about the sun...

Bru na Boinne, then bend of the river Boyne (chartered helicopter view)

The River Boyne

In the museum, home sweet home, Ireland in the neolithic, 5,000-6,000 years ago

4-seater

Neolithic toy

How to move megaliths...at Newgrange, they were probably floated down the river
on rafts, from a site miles away; then schlepped up the hill on log rollers; imagine
the work involved in just felling the trees and shaping the logs, using only stone tools...

"Symbols" found in megalithic "art"; no Rosetta Stone found as yet

After the bus ride, the front exterior of Newgrange, with the quartz and the giant
curb stones; also after the tour (no fotos) of the passage way and cruciform chamber,
and demonstration of how the roof box directs sunlight, at sunrise on winter solstice,
down the passage way to the chamber and the ashes of the dead; so imagine how
you would calculate that 6,000 years ago...

Vicki beside one of the decorated curbstones at Newgrange; rather more of them
occur at Knowth, next hill over

The entry stone (said to be the most photographed megalith in the world), the
entrance, and the roof box

We hope to be spending winter solstice 2016 in Ireland; but we'll
be home for Xmas