The Newgrange passage grave in Co Meath is famous for its winter solstice alignment towards the dawn sun but its sister site at Knowth is now threatening to eclipse it, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
The winter solstice is upon us and with it the annual pilgrimage to the Newgrange passage-grave monument in Co Meath. Few of those jockeying for a coveted place inside the tomb in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the dawn sun on December 21st will be aware, however, that closeby is another passage grave site that is at least as important as Newgrange.
The Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site includes not one but three distinct monuments, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. Knowth opened fully to the public only this year, after 40 years of continuous excavations, work that revealed its genuine importance.
Knowth has two great passage grave chambers, the larger almost twice as long as the passage at Newgrange and the longest in the world, explains Clare Tuffy, manager of the Brú na Bóinne centre. It also has 17 "satellite" passage graves and contains two-thirds of Europe's entire collection of Neolithic passage grave art, she says.
The three sites lie within a bend of the River Boyne about nine kilometres inland from Drogheda. They date to about 3,200 BC, predating the pyramids of Egypt. The people who built these monuments belonged to a thriving farming community which used simple tools of stone and wood to produce food, but also to build the striking monuments that stand in the Co Meath countryside.
Newgrange has been famous for centuries and was open to the public as long ago as 1699, says Tuffy. The late Prof M.J. O'Kelly of University College Dublin started excavations in 1962 that finished in 1975. He discovered Newgrange's exceptionally accurate eastern alignment with the solstice sunrise in 1967.
Much smaller Dowth was discovered in 1847, so it has also had a long history of visitors. While scholars knew that Knowth too must have contained important Stone Age remains, it was not until Prof George Eogan of UCD began excavations there that its real importance began to emerge.
"When Prof Eogan started in 1962, it just looked like an overgrown mound," says Tuffy. "It was he who discovered the two great burial chambers, the first in 1967 and the second in 1968. Both of these passages are longer than the passage at Newgrange."
It took many years to open up the site because it contained remains from many eras stretching back thousands of years, she explains. "Knowth was a far more complicated site than Newgrange. He went right back down, peeling back the layers."
There were people living on the Knowth hill top from before the monuments were built right through the Norman period. Eogan encountered the remains of a Norman house dating from the 12th or 13th century, when the area was under the control of the Cistercian Abbey of Mellifont.
Between the 8th and 12th centuries there was a large village settlement on the big mound, "the remains of a very early Christian settlement," she says, including 13 houses and a number of "souterraines" or underground tunnels used for storage. This was during the time when Knowth was the royal seat of the kings of Northern Brega.
Two or three centuries before this the hill was used as a massive defended site with two deep ditches, as discovered by Eogan's excavations.
His work showed that people were using the site for various purposes right back to before the monuments were built.
The great mound is about 95 metres across, covering 0.6 hectares and contains two passage tombs. The longer eastern-facing passage is 40 metres long, leading into a chamber that, like Newgrange, has three side recesses and a beehive shaped roof built by corbelling.
The western-facing tomb is 34 metres long and although the two don't connect directly under the mound, their ends sit no more than three metres apart. There are 17 other smaller passage grave mounds, some of which connect to the larger two. Only two of these were built before the great passages.
"The alignments are not as significant as that at Newgrange," says Tuffy.
"They are cruder but as monuments they are as impressive. If Knowth had one great claim to fame it would be that it contains two thirds of the entire European passage tomb art collection and that is just one aspect of the monument," she adds.
There are carved and decorated kerbstones across the site both outside and inside the passages. Two more treasures were found inside one of the longer passage's recesses. One was a large, wonderfully carved sandstone basin which once held the cremated remains of the dead.
The second was a small flint mace head, so beautifully carved that it must have had great ceremonial importance, says Tuffy.
Brú na Bóinne ranks as a World Heritage Site because of the significance of these remains, she says. The three sites need to be taken as a whole, three parts of a single Neolithic landscape.
"Then it really begins to appear on a par with the pyramids," she adds.
More information about the Brú na Bóinne site is available at www.knowth.com