We left Galway by bus, but stopped to pick up a rental car at Dublin Airport so that we could go to visit the Neolithic sites of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth, collectively known as Brú na Bóinne. One of just two UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Republic of Ireland, it is inscribed on the UNESCO list as “Brú na Bóinne – Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne“. These sites are all passage tombs built in the late Stone Age, about 500 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza and Stonehenge in England.
The drive to the site was short and we arrived with time to spare for our prebooked admission time. There are a limited number of tickets sold each day that include entry into the passage tomb so we had to be right on top of things to buy ours 30 days in advance. Only the sites of Knowth and Newgrange are accessible from the visitor centre, While Knowth is in some ways more impressive with 19 satellite tombs and an almost intact circle of kerbstones, Newgrange is the most famous site due to its huge size and passage illuminated on the winter solstice through a roofbox. We began our tour by seeing the exterior of Knowth and capturing a sweeping view of the entire area. Then, a short bus ride took us to Newgrange where we had time to walk around the huge monument (covering over an acre and composed of over 200,000 tonnes of stone), before entering the passage. No photos allowed inside the tomb, so we simply had to enjoy the sense of amazement that people from over 5,000 years ago could have built such a huge structure for an unknown purpose.
The ban on interior photography at Newgrange meant that we had to download the featured image above from Flickr. (All other images on our site are our own, taken during actual visits.) And since we were forced to download an image, we thought that we might as well feature one showing the illumination of the passage during the winter solstice. The photo below showing one of us in an illuminated passage was taken at the very realistic simulation in the visitor centre. We were there in May, not at the winter solstice, so naturally could not see the real thing.
After our enjoyable visit to Newgrange we returned our rental car and carried on into Dublin, our final stop of this trip.
Images of our visit to Brú na Bóinne on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720317057434
This section is for the true winter solstice nerds!
Since daily demand for entrance into the passage chamber at Newgrange is so huge, you can only imagine what the demand is for entrance during the days around the solstice when the chamber is illuminated. Usually, spaces are allocated using a lottery system; ~30,000 people apply and a hundred or so are chosen. Fortunately, COVID changed that and for the pandemic years the chamber illumination was live streamed by the Irish National Monuments Service. So enjoy the Newgrange solstice on YouTube without winning the lottery! Should you be lucky enough to be able to visit Newgrange at the solstice and enter the passage tomb, plan to do so before the year 5,000AD. Scientists have calculated that as the earth’s tilt on its axis slowly increases, that will be the approximate year when the sun will no longer align with the rooftbox.