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Nicole's
Travelogues and Budget Travel Tips..
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NEWGRANGE, IRELAND
I visited Newgrange with Mary Gibbons Tours that I booked at the Dublin Tourism Center for € 35. After visiting Slane and the Hill of Tara, we headed out to the Bru na Boinne/Newgrange Visitor Center. At the center you are given a sticker with a bus time on it. They regulate the numbers that can visit Newgrange very strictly (which is great!) and if you miss your bus, you are not given the chance to get on another bus. Anyway, we were assigned the 1:15 bus, so we had 45 minutes until our bus left. We watched the 15 minute movie on Newgrange and then went to the cafe for lunch. The gift shop closed from 1-2pm, so I browsed through and bought a Newgrange book after lunch. I headed to the bus stop by walking over a bridge and up a pathway. We got on the bus and left exactly at 1:15 leaving 2 other people running on the bridge. Ha hah oh ok that wasn't funny. It was a 5 minute drive to the Newgrange site.
We got out and was assigned a guide who walked us up to the tomb. It was sooooo windy and freeeeeezing! I had my Raider beanie on and my hood on over that and my ears were still cold. Yikes! We entered the tomb and had to go in single file slowly. Some parts of the passage were quite snug and you had to duck down and turn sideways to get through. Definitely not a site to visit if you are claustophobic! When we were inside, the guide told us about the drawings and construction of the site. Basically, they don't know how or why it was built so it is up to our imaginations. Then the guide turned off the lights and demonstrated with lights what happens during every Winter Solstice. It was very cool! After the demonstration, we went back outside and were allowed to wonder the grounds for about 10 minutes before taking the bus back to the center.
Many finds have been made at Newgrange, including some curious items such as a stone phallus and an iron wedge. One type of find which arouses the interest of archaeologists are the Roman coins, many of which were reported to have been found at Newgrange. In 1993, Newgrange and its sister sites Knowth and Dowth were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO because of their outstanding cultural legacy.
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Contact Info: Newgrange is open all year. You can only get to Newgrange by taking a bus from the visitor's center. The site is extremely busy during the summer months and if you aren't arriving as part of a tour, you should get there early in the morning to secure a spot on the bus.
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Newgrange was constructed around 3200BC, according to the most reliable Carbon 14 dates available from archaeology. This makes it more than 600 years older than the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, and 1,000 years more ancient than Stonehenge. Newgrange sits on the top of a ridge on the Boyne River about five miles west of the town of Drogheda. This area has great eminence thoughout Irish history and legend says that the foundations of Christianity were laid here. Two miles or downstream from Newgrange is Oldbridge, where the Battle of the Boyne took place in 1690.
Newgrange was built in a time when there was only stone, not metal, used as an everyday material for tools and weapons. On the Winter Solstice, the light of the rising sun enters the roofbox at Newgrange and illuminates the passage, shining onto the floor of the inner chamber. The sunbeam illuminates the chamber of Newgrange for just 17 minutes. A survey of the roofbox, passage and chamber of Newgrange by Dr. Jon Patrick in 1972 found that the Winter Solstice orientation of the site was an original feature, and that they were sophisticated constructions, intended to maximize the accuracy and length of the beam entering the chamber.
