Blog

I’ve been fascinated to follow the amazing amount of research that has come out in the last five years about Brú na Bóinne or the Bend in the Boyne, where Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth are located. One reason is that it supports so much of what I imagine in my novel Winter Sun – an ancient culture in tune with earth and sky where gathering for ritual and ceremony would happen all the time, particularly at important points in the wheel of the year.

            One finding that I was very excited about concerned the number of days that the sun illuminates the chamber of Newgrange around Winter Solstice. Since the re-discovery of this wonderful feature in 1967, it had been assumed that the sun shone into the chamber maybe two or three days on either side of Winter Solstice, and that only a small elite group would be able to experience the illumination. I had always disputed this, and believed that access to the chamber was much more open. In 2020, due to public health concerns related to Covid, the chamber was closed and researchers took the opportunity to conduct an investigation with lights and cameras and other technology to record the sun’s rays. To the surprise of the researchers, the chamber was illuminated up until 8 January – although obviously with less intensity the further away from Winter Solstice. This means that light could enter chamber for  over 30 days!

            The Bend of the Boyne refers to a curve in the River Boyne which enfolds a large area of almost 2,000 acres. New discoveries now demonstrate that it is a complex ceremonial landscape containing the three well known monuments mentioned above – and much more. There are remains of a feasting hall, a cursus for processions, all kinds of small cairns, barrows and henges. A whole new cairn about half the size of Newgrange was discovered during excavations of Dowth House, with wonderful stone carvings and inner chambers. Due to draught conditions, evidence of a huge wooden henge (circle) that is 500 ft in diameter just beside the mound of Newgrange was caught on camera. Various other archaeological techniques have helped to paint a picture of a huge gathering place that some archaeologists now call a congregational site. The scepticism of archaeologists in the past about ritual, ceremony and astronomical alignments is no longer sustainable.

            The naming of Newgrange and other monuments as ‘tombs’ is also something I have always disputed – along with many others. Back in 1989, Marija Gimbutas, a world famous archaeologist, visited Ireland and presented her view that there had been a culture all over Neolithic Europe – what she called ‘Old Europe’ –that had revered the earth and represented the earth through aspects of women’s bodies. For her, Newgrange and other cairns were clearly wombs –an inner chamber reached by a long passageway. Although she was ridiculed at the time, the last 30 years of research has supported her ideas – including that the migration of people from eastern Europe overturned this culture. At the time I wrote an article “A Womb not a Tomb – New Light on Newgrange’ in which I discussed how Marija Gimbutas’s ‘Language of the Goddess’ could apply to the spirals, concentric circles, wavy lines and all the other beautiful artwork that we find at Brú na Bóinne. And of course Irish myth and legend are full of references to goddesses. The River Boyne and Brú na Bóinne are called after the goddess Boann. Brú means palace or great hall of hospitality, and Bóinne is the generative of Boann, a goddess in Irish Mythology. Boann comprises ‘bo’ – the Irish for cow, and ‘find’ – the Irish for white. (The exact spelling depends on which version of Irish.) Boann, and the Boyne river, are associated with the Milky Way – I think of Boann as the milky way beaming down on us, offering the nurturance of abundant milk and the wisdom of hazel nuts. She has many associations to the bird aspect of the goddess (swans in particular, as well as owls and ravens) as well as to the life-giving and nurturing aspects.

            In this blog I have touched on some of the themes that fascinate me – the culture of ancient people, the cairns and monuments and stone structures that they left behind, the myths that followed much later, the possibilities for spirituality and consciousness. I found over the years that often I had already imagined what new archaeological research is showing us. And this is partly because humans across time and place share so much when we connect with the earth and the cosmos. Along with all of the new (and old) writing on myth, legend and landscape, we can see that the emergence of the feminine, of goddesses, and of earth based spirituality is actually a re-emergence.