Thankfully we have learned over the years that it is very prudent to stay in the city of arrival for at least few nights before taking on driving out of a city, especially when we have to orient our brains to driving on the other side of the road. It is somewhat nerve wracking when getting started and the speed limits in Ireland make us howl with laughter, as they will allow high speeds on narrow, twisty roads.
We headed north and then took off the highway to a small side road, to make our way to the Fourknocks passage tomb in Co. Meath. This is how things work in Ireland, which endears the place to us; there is a locked steel door, and to get the key, you have to turn left at the green and white house and head down a narrow road to the 6th house on the right. However, the directions I found online always said it was the 5th house, when we got to the 5th house, there was a sign on the gate pointing to the next house for the key. I rang the bell of the 6th house and Mrs. White answered, she promptly gave me the key and wanted to know if we were going to Newgrange, I had not planned on it. You have to leave a 20-Euro note with Mrs. White as a deposit for the key. We then went to Fourknocks and the new sign states that you stop at the 6th house.
Fourknocks would have been built by Neolithic farmers, about 5,000 years ago. Fourknocks is derived from the Irish Fuair Cnocs, meaning cold hills. The hills were certainly cold today as a huge storm has been hitting Ireland for the last few days, to the point where there is a weather warning and a risk of flooding. The southwest and west are really getting hammered, but it has come to the east with a vengeance.
When Fourknocks was excavated in the 1950s, there was no roof, but a post hole suggests that a pole may have supported the roof structure made of wood or hides. The span of the chamber is so wide that it would have been impossible to have put up a corbelled roof of stone, as is the norm. A metal-domed roof has been placed on the mound with small skylights, located to light up some of the wonderful rock art in this tomb. Since the metal dome is modern technology, it leaks.
The tombs located in Ireland are quite special, as they have a lot of rock art, that is not the case in Orkney, where we visited tombs some years ago. It really is a fantastic experience to stand in such an old structure and look at the work of the ancients. There are four small chambers off the main large chamber. There were fragments of dozens of human skeletons as well as stone beads, hammer pendants and bone pins.
View of the countryside from the Fourknocks mound
Entry into Fourknocks
Ancient stone art, zigzag, this would have been above the doorway
Chamber of Fourknocks
Fourknocks Passage
Fourknocks Mound
When we left Fourknocks we had more time than I had anticipated, so we thought we may as well go to Newgrange, so I asked Mrs. White what she thought and she suggested we go. It was a fairly short drive across country on little roads through farmland. We didn’t know if there would still be a tour or not, but there was a bus leaving the visitor’s centre in half an hour, at 3:15. We went to the cafeteria to have tea, of course, the Irish make fantastic tea, none of this watery dish water we get at home. We then headed to the bus, there were seven of us on the bus. The weather was just horrific, pouring rain and a bloody strong wind. You have to imagine that the tombs were constructed at the top of hills, so things were fairly brutal.
Newgrange is the big tourist draw as far as tombs go, so I didn’t really want to go there as it is heavily restored on the outside, and you have to go with a tour guide. However, it is an amazing tomb and was well worth the visit. The passage is really long, relative to the tombs we have visited, but a nearby tomb, Knowth, is even longer. The passage goes uphill and there are really interesting reasons for this. From the outside, there is a light box over top of the entrance, this is for the sun to enter the tomb and travel along the passageway and into the main chamber. The light box is at the level of our feet when we get to the chamber so the sunlight hits the floor in the middle of the chamber. Three things had to be lined up for this to work: the sun at the horizon, the opening of the light box and the floor of the chamber. The alignment only lasts for 21 minutes on the solstice. The neolithic farmers were expert engineers, as everything was dry stacked stone, no concrete to keep things in place.
The guide claims that the roof was intact and has not been restored, which is amazing, as it is a corbelled roof of huge stone slabs and it does not leak and has never leaked. The Neolithic builders etched out sloping channels for the water when they joined the rocks together.
Although the Newgrange mound is huge, the chamber is smaller than the chamber at Fourknocks. The archaeologists have not discovered evidence of another chamber, but it seems possible. There are a myriad of theories with regard to Newgrange, really, most is speculative, as we don't know what meaning the tombs had, if they were tombs, or why they built them. It seems to us, that a lot of the theories are based on modern thinking, which we don't necessarily agree with.
The entrance of Newgrange is very heavily restored and the reconstruction is based on theory as well, which remains controversial. They now believe that the reconstructed angle of the wall was not possible. Also, the white stone, which is quartz, that has been attached to the wall, may not have been used to face the wall at all, it may have been simply spread on the ground in front of the mound. The modern take on Newgrange is rather jarring, relative to all of the tombs that we have visited.
The rock art in Newgrange is fabulous, a unique form is the triple spiral, of which there are two in the tomb. They also speculate that the large upright stones in the chamber have been pebbled so that when the sun hits them during the solstice, the sunlight would shimmer and suggest movement.
When we left the tomb, it was ferocious outside with the rain coming at us sideways. All in our group ditched out and headed for the bus; however, we walked around the outside of the tomb and took photos of the large kerb stones with rock art. The rest of the group had to wait for us on the bus, but we are fast movers so they didn’t have to wait very long.
Newgrange entrance with light box above
Kerb stone with rock art at back of mound
After we left Newgrange, we headed to Northern Ireland to Newcastle in Co. Down. The drive was a bit of a trial in the torrential rain and it was getting dark. The worst part was the flooding on the roads, at one point the car skidded a bit sideways when we hit a lake on the road. Keep in mind that these are fairly narrow roads and are all lined in hedges, which annoy us.
When we finally got to Newcastle, we had to find an ATM to get GBP to pay for our apartment, we had to ask people where to find one, as it was pitch dark and all streets are one-way and the traffic was nuts. The people are excellent and happy to help. I was texting the apartment owner and had to keep putting off our arrival time as the drive took longer than we anticipated.
We finally got to the apartment and got everything sorted, but we needed to go and get groceries. Since we were feeling burnt out on driving, we decided to walk. We missed a turn and walked a long way up the wrong road, figured it out, turned around and then got on the correct road to the Tesco. We then had a long and hilarious conversation with the young stock guy in the wine department. He is a beer drinker, omg, who isn’t, everywhere we travel, beer seems to be the beverage of choice. To make things even more hysterical, his beer of choice is Canadian beer, we just about fell over, as he didn’t know we were Canadian. However, he came through, as he said his brother liked a particular red wine that was on special, so we grabbed it, and lo and behold, it was pretty good.
After we got back to the apartment soaking wet, we had some much needed wine and then cooked dinner, finally dining around 10:00 P.M. The weather is supposed to be wicked tomorrow as well, so we will see what we get up to then.
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