Newgrange and Bru Na Boine

This last Friday the Early Irish History Class traveled to Newgrange and Loughcrew. We were unable to visit Knowth, which is the coolest of the three sites (that is, Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth, the three largest Neolithic cemetaries in Europe) as the excavation of the site has just recently been completed and the site has not yet gone through the same preservation techniques that Newgrange has. Because of this, Knowth is closed from Halloween weekend on to preserve it from the cold weather.

So what is Newgrange? Newgrange (what you see above) is a humongous man-made

mound that features a passage tomb inside (The passage ways inside make a "t" shape). It is built with hundreds, if not thousands of large stones placed on top of each other that are slowly moved inward to create a peaked roof (see picture below for the inside of a DIFFERENT passage tomb). The stone was then covered with layers of turf to protect the rocks from elements, and possibly to make it blend in with the landscape/hide it. As thousands of years went by, the soil layer got higher and many of these passage tombs/mounds were hidden. This one was stumbled upon by accident.

Inside, each of the dead end cubby-like areas in the "t" shape had a large bowl (one of these was still featured in the Newgrange site but no pictures are allowed inside) which, when excavated, was filled with the cremated remains of what they estimate was around 100 bodies.

(Most passage tombs don't have these grates on top. This is also a picture from the passage tomb at Loughcrew, not Newgrange, but it gives you an idea as to how they were built).

Loughcrew is a series of passage tombs, many of them collapsed. However, one of them still remains intact.

Many of these passage tombs are also covered in rock art, carvings that were handmade. Here are some examples of rock art from Loughcrew!

Off to Spain, Italy, and Berlin!!!