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Old December 21st, 2022 #1
jagd messer
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Default Ireland, Newgrange

Newgrange - World Heritage Site





Newgrange is a 5,200 year old passage tomb located in the Boyne Valley in Ireland's Ancient East.

Newgrange was built by Stone Age farmers, the mound is 85m (279ft) in diameter and 13m (43ft) high, an area of about 1 acre.

A passage measuring 19m (62ft) leads into a chamber with 3 alcoves. The passage and chamber are aligned with the rising sun on the mornings around the Winter Solstice.

Newgrange is surrounded by 97 large stones called kerbstones some of which are engraved with megalithic art; the most striking is the entrance stone.

Access to the Newgrange monument is via the Brú na Bóinne Visitors Centre.

Newgrange is a Stone Age (Neolithic) monument in the Boyne Valley, County Meath, it is the jewel in the crown of Ireland's Ancient East. Newgrange was constructed about 5,200 years ago (3,200 B.C.) which makes it older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza. Newgrange is a large circular mound 85m (279ft) in diameter and 13m (43ft) high with a 19m (63ft) stone passageway and chambers inside. The mound is ringed by 97 large kerbstones, some of which are engraved with symbols called megalithic art.

Newgrange was built by a farming community that prospered on the rich lands of the Boyne Valley. Knowth and Dowth are similar mounds that together with Newgrange have been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Archaeologists classified Newgrange as a passage tomb, however Newgrange is now recognised to be much more than a passage tomb. Ancient Temple is a more fitting classification, a place of astrological, spiritual, religious and ceremonial importance, much as present day cathedrals are places of prestige and worship where dignitaries may be laid to rest.

Newgrange is a large kidney shaped mound covering an area of over one acre, retained at the base by 97 kerbstones, some of which are richly decorated with megalithic art. The 19m long inner passage leads to a cruciform chamber with a corbelled roof. The amount of time and labour invested in construction of Newgrange suggests a well-organized society with specialised groups responsible for different aspects of construction.

Newgrange is part of a complex of monuments built along a bend of the River Boyne known collectively as Brú na Bóinne. The other two principal monuments are Knowth (the largest) and Dowth, but throughout the area there are as many as 35 smaller mounds.


Winter Solstice





Newgrange Winter Solstice.

Newgrange is best known for the illumination of its passage and chamber by the winter solstice sun. Above the entrance to the passage at Newgrange there is an opening called a roof-box. This baffling orifice held a great surprise for those who unearthed it. Its purpose is to allow sunlight to penetrate the chamber on the shortest days of the year, around December 21st, the winter solstice. At dawn, from December 19th to 23rd, a narrow beam of light penetrates the roof-box and reaches the floor of the chamber, gradually extending to the rear of the chamber.

As the sun rises higher, the beam widens within the chamber so that the whole room becomes dramatically illuminated. This event lasts for 17 minutes, beginning around 9am. The accuracy of Newgrange as a time-telling device is remarkable when one considers that it was built 500 years before the Great Pyramids and more than 1,000 years before Stonehenge.

The intent of the Stone Age farmers who build Newgrange was undoubtedly to mark the beginning of the new year. In addition, it may have served as a powerful symbol of the victory of life over death.

Each year the winter solstice event attracts much attention at Newgrange. Many gather at the ancient tomb to wait for dawn, as people did 5,000 years ago. So great is the demand to be one of the few inside the chamber during the solstice that there is a free annual lottery (application forms are available at the Visitor Centre). Unfortunately, as with many Irish events that depend upon sunshine, if the skies are overcast, there is not much to be seen. Yet all agree that it is an extraordinary feeling to wait in the darkness, as people did so long ago, for the longest night of the year to end.


Newgrange Winter Solstice - Sunrise Alignment

https://www.newgrange.com/winter_solstice.htm
WebNewgrange - Winter Solstice. Newgrange is best known for the illumination of its passage and chamber by the rising sun at the Winter Solstice . Above the entrance to the passage of the mound there is a …

21 XII 2022.

Today is the 2022 Solstice.
 
Old December 23rd, 2022 #2
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Old December 27th, 2022 #3
jagd messer
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Default Ancient Past In Sligo

The Ancient Past In Sligo


In northwest Ireland, a treasure trove of ancient monuments where you may find yourself the only living visitor.


Thousands of years ago, the northwest coast was the point of arrival for Ireland’s very first inhabitants. In an area around Sligo city, the remains of their societies are so plentiful you can feel almost overwhelmed by the ancient past. If you want to get away from the crowds that overrun the Ireland’s southwest, you can explore these tombs, stone circles and fortress remains in a landscape as lonely and untouched as any in the country. Lonely, but still quite inviting. With a coastline warmed by the Gulf Stream, Sligo’s more temperate than one might expect this far north – a definite plus when you’re visiting ancient ruins on foot.

One of the reasons there’s such a great wealth of archaeological evidence here is that the Irish are so superstitious, and even today consider it bad luck to interfere with burial grounds. Ring forts in the area have remained untouched partly due to a belief that faeries hide within them. Even in these unspiritual times, there’s a healthy respect for such spirits.

Warrior Queen’s Cairn




Just a few miles west of Sligo City, you can start your tour in a place where history and mythology meet on a mountain called Knocknarea. The considerable effort it takes to make the 45- minute climb up Knocknarea is rewarded with a spectacular panoramic vista of the Atlantic Ocean. In clear weather, you can see as far as Fermanagh, Cavan, Mayo and south over Roscommon from this perch. At the top of Knocknarea lies Maeve’s Cairn , a clearly manmade hill about 35 feet high and 160 feet across that’s believed to cover a tomb built by neolithic people around 3000 BC. Maeve was a mythical queen of Connacht (the western counties of Ireland), and is reputed to be buried here standing up in a warrior’s stance. But since the cairn has never been excavated, we must take the story with a pinch of salt. Local legend says it’s good luck to bring a stone up to place on the cairn, bad luck to take one off of it.


Not far from it is an area of oval and circular enclosures, where hundreds of arrowheads and tools were found when it was excavated in the 1980’s. Also here are the ‘middens,” a poetic name for gigantic ancient food waste dumps that draw tremendous interest from archaeologists. They certainly convey a sense of the size of the community that once lived here. From atop Knocknarea, you’ll see a 120 yard-long midden down on the beach that survived for thousands of years under the sand before being exposed by wave erosion. Higher up the mountainside, another, smaller midden suggests that there may have been an area for special feasts on the spot. Knocknarea is open from 9:30 am – 6:30 pm from May – September (last admission 45 minutes before closing).

Carrowmore, lying about a mile to the east of Knocknarea, is a megalithic stone cemetery, the largest in Ireland, which covers an area about a one and a half square miles. The approximately 65 monuments here are oval-shaped clusters, with a cairn (pile of stones) in the center. They’re known as “Portal Tombs” or “Dolmens,” and are generally made of two upright stones that create a small chamber roofed by a flat flagstone.


The tombs are spread out over a large area that cuts across numerous local farms, creating a unique collision of the present and the distant past. It’s location on a flat plain is a bit unusual, given that most pre-historic tombs were set on hilltops. Included here is a tomb that archaeologists have dated at 4600 BC, which, if correct, would make it the oldest portal tomb in Ireland.


The Ancient Capital


From Carrowmore, you can see the mountaintop Carrowkeel complex rising in the distance to the east. This neolithic necropolis is believed by some to be the stone age location of the capital of the Sligo region. It will take about an hour to drive there – ask for directions before you leave Carrowmore. Visitors to Carrowkeel’s mountaintop will often find themselves completely alone with the past. About 15 cairns sit on limestone shelves. Archaeologists have found neolithic artifacts here from 2500 BC, and date some of the tombs from the Bronze age around 1500 BC. On the limestone face below Carrowkeel’s summit are the impressions of some 80 huts built as long as five thousand years ago.

Looking from this summit across Lough Arrow, you can see the “Labey Rock,” a portal Dolmen named for the Irish for bed, “leaba.” Tradition says that women who are childless can improve their fertility by lying on this rock. All around, hills known as drumlins (formed by retreating glaciers) dominate the scenery of south Sligo. A good way to complete the tour of the area is to stop at the castle ruin of nearby Ballymote. It was here that the Book of Ballymote was written in 1391, which enables scholars to interpret Ireland’s ancient Ogham script.

It’s possible for a hearty traveler to walk from Sligo to Carrowmore and on to Knocknarea and back into town in one day.

Maeve: A Frisky Queen


Queen Maeve may be more legendary than historical, but she’s a pretty racy legend. The many different versions of her life story, including a famous poem called “The Old Age of Queen Maeve” by W.B. Yeats, portray her as a woman who combined the skills of a warrior with a distinct, one might even say insatiable, taste for carnal pleasure. At a time when Celtic women were not expected to be monogamous, even with the confines of a marriage, she allegedly had affairs with officers in her army, partly in order to secure their loyalty to her. Warriors who put in the best performance on the battle fields were also, allegedly, offered “personal” favors by the queen.

She also was imbued, in many stories, with magic powers, including the ability to outrun horses, and to make an army invincible by virtue of her mere presence on the battlefield (soldiers for the opposition were said to fall to the ground in fits of desire at just the sight of her.

Whether she was a real person who’s story got mixed up with that of an Irish mythological figure, or a pure invention isn’t clear. One way or the other, though, she clearly has fans in the modern world (many of whom sing her praises on various websites) who see her as an icon of female empowerment.

Knocknarea and carrowmore, alone with the ancient past in Sligo ...



A dolmen or portal tomb is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of two or more upright megaliths supporting a large flat horizontal capstone or "table".A dolmen or portal tomb is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of two or more upright megaliths supporting a large flat horizontal capstone or "table".

Cromlechs are several elongated stones places in the ground (menhirs), forming one or several concentric circles. And sometimes, in the center of such a structure, there is another stone – menhir or dolmen. Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery: Where Prehistoric Ireland went for Ritual Burials in a Big Way.

Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery is a prehistoric site located on the Cúil Irra Peninsula, not far from the county town of Sligo in Ireland. With up to 60 megalithic monuments recorded by archaeologists, Carrowmore (meaning ‘Great Quarter’) Megalithic Cemetery is the largest of its kind in Ireland and regarded to be amongst the oldest in Europe. The tombs at this site have provided archaeologists with information about the burial practices of the prehistoric inhabitants of the area.

The Expansive Carrowmore Cemetery


It has been estimated that there were originally over 100 monuments at Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery. Others have claimed that there had been as many as 200 monuments at the site. During the early part of the 19 th century, however, land clearance by farmers, meddling by amateur archaeologists, and quarrying have caused much damage to the site. About 60 of these monuments have been identified, though only around half of them are visible to visitors today. Various types of tombs are found at the Carrowmore Cemetery, including chamber tombs, cairns, and even ring forts.


The two main types of monuments at the site, however, are passage tombs and dolmens. Passage tombs consist of a burial chamber (either single or multiple) covered with earth or stone and attached to a narrow passage made of large stones.

An Important Burial Site

Carrowmore is one of the four major passage tomb cemeteries in Ireland, the other three being Newgrange, Loughcrew, and Carrowkeel. As for the dolmens, these are tombs formed by laying a large flat stone on top of upright stones. At Carrowmore the dolmens are normally surrounded by a circle of standing stones.

One of the dolmens at Carrowmore.

The results of radiocarbon dating from the 1970s suggest that the oldest monuments at Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery were built around 4600 BC, and more tombs were added over the centuries. Folklore, on the other hand, date these tombs to Ireland’s mythological past, asserting that they date to the Battle of Magh Tuireadh, where the Firbolgs were defeated by the Tuatha De Danann. There is evidence that during the subsequent Bronze and Iron Ages, some of the tombs were re-used and re-shaped, an indication that these monuments continued to make their presence on the landscape felt long after the cultures that built them had disappeared.

The Significant Central Monument


Archaeologists have recognised a ‘pattern’ to the burial ground. The largest monument at the site is a cairn known as Listoghil. Apart from that, Listoghil is also notable for being the only one at the site that is known to have been decorated with megalithic art. Moreover, this is the only tomb at the cemetery where both cremations and inhumations have been found. It may be added that cremation was the norm at the site. In any case, archaeologists have found that the rest of the tombs were arranged in a roughly oval shape around Listoghil, suggesting that this may have been the focal point of the cemetery.

The Humans Within


The human remains found in the tombs suggest that the prehistoric inhabitants of the region had a complex set of funerary practices, and included such processes as excarnation (the removal of the flesh and organs of a dead person before burial ), and reburial. Additionally, the grave goods that have been found in the tombs serve to provide further information about the people who lived in the area during that period. These grave goods include antler pins with mushroom-shaped heads, and stone / clay balls, which are the usual objects found in the passage tombs of Ireland. Finally, it may be said that there are various questions about the tombs at Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery that have yet to be answered. One of these, for instance, relates to how the presence of these different types of tombs in one area ought to be interpreted. Are these tombs indicative of different cultural groups, or perhaps a reflection of the social hierarchy of the community, or maybe something totally different?

Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery: Where Prehistoric

Spent the 'best days' of my life in Sligo.
 
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