And so it begins, our road tour of The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Martin from Little Gems picked us up and we were on our way at 9:30am. We headed north, with our first planned stop being the Newgrange in the Boyne Valley of County Meath, possibly the best known Neolithic Irish passage tomb Cairn. We arrived at 10:30am but couldn’t get on a tour until 12:30pm.
So in the time between we headed off and had a look at Slane Castle and Distillery, but the tour times didn’t work with our requirements so we went to see Slane Abbey ruins. The Abbey was built on the hill where tradition tells that St Patrick lit an Easter Fire, unwittingly before King Laoghaire had lit his at nearby Tara. This infuriated the King, who summoned an army and rode to the hill to deal with the interloper. During the confrontation St Patrick is said to have converted the druid King Laoghaire to Christianity, and indeed the King later became the first Bishop of Slane. The Easter Fire continues to be lit every year on the Hill of Slane.
We returned to Newgrange and were soon on a bus over to the site. The cairn is approximately 80m in diameter and 12m high covering an acre of land. It was built in about 3200BC, making it older than the Gaza pyramids and Stonehenge. It has a base ring of 97 large kerbstones, and at the front it has a retaining wall of white quartz cobblestones. The large stone at the passage entry is carved with a series of 5 spirals. Kerbstones 52 and 67 also show a variation of the spiral pattern in the carvings on them. Above the entrance is a roofbox. The entrance tunnel into the cairn chamber is 17m long and about 1.5m high with variable width, at a couple of points you need to turn sideways to pass through a narrowing in the tunnel. Once in the main chamber you enter a space about 5m in diameter and 7m high. There are 3 recesses off the chamber, forming a celtic cross type shape in conjunction with the entrance tunnel. There are more spiral carvings in each of these recesses. At sunrise on the three days before the winter solstice (21st Dec) and the two days after (6 days in total) the sun shines through the roofbox at 8:58am until 9:15am and traces a line of light down the length of the tunnel and into the recess at the top of the chamber. It is thought that the cairn and chamber were both a burial site and a temple. The cairn and chamber were rediscovered in the 1600’s and then again in the 1800’s. It was left open to the public and suffered a significant amount of Victorian era graffiti. It wasn’t until the 1960’s and 1970’s that any serious archaeological investigation was carried out on the site. It reminded us of the Cairn and tunnel tomb we had seen on the Orkney Islands, Maeshowe. But Maeshowe to us, was the more genuine structure, it was essentially how it was built, where Newgrange has had major restoration works carried out on the outside of it.
After Newgrange we headed north again, to Mainistir Bhuithe Monasterboice, the site of a monastery founded by St Bute (who died in 521AD). Nothing remains of that monastery, the oldest monuments on the site now are three High Crosses and a Round Tower, all dating from the 10th century. The crosses belong to the so called, The Spiritual Group because they all display biblical scenes. They all take the form of Celtic Crosses, and are impressive to look at. Deb also found some black and white cows grazing in a paddock behind the tower. On the way out I saw a small nondescript plaque on a stone wall in memory of the victims of “The Great Famine”, 1845 – 1850, who were buried here. A touching reminder of much harder times.
From there we headed further north into Northern Ireland, and onto see Rowallane Garden in Saintfield, Ballynahinch. The garden was created by Rev John Moore in the 1860’s and contains a number of separate gardens. We have found that walled gardens are something special to see, the microclimates created by the walls make for a very diverse and usually beautiful garden. This was no exception, even though most of the flowers were past their best. This garden had the added bonus of an outer walled garden that contained a small creek water feature. After we left the walled gardens we walked through a few of the more woodland and open field areas of the gardens, we even found a small grove of Yew trees, Deb’s new favourite tree. Happy girl. ?
We then drove up to Belfast, just in time for peak hour traffic. Good patient driving by Martin got us safely to our hotel to end an interesting day.
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