The Boyne Valley and its surroundings, situated in a loop of the River Boyne, some 20 miles north-west from Dublin, a few miles west of Drogheda, County Meath, is one of the most important Irish locations as far as historical heritage is concerned, from pre-celtic to medieval times. In this area you can find the pre-celtic tumula of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, the Hill of Tara, where the ancient Irish kings settled their kingdom (actually, there is not much to see in Tara nowadays, but the site is inspiring), Monasterboice with its High Crosses, the Mellifont Abbey, and many other interesting things.

Newgrange is the best known Irish passage tomb. It was constructed around 3200BC, this makes it more than 500 years older than the Giza Pyramids in Egypt and 1,000 years more ancient than Stonehenge. It is about 80m in diameter and is surounded by a kerb of 97 stones. Some of these are elaborately carved. Inside the mound is a passageway lined with roughly-hewn stone slabs, which leads to a cross-shaped chamber.

The entrance to the passage is a simple doorway formed by two upright slabs and a horizontal lintel. Above the doorway is a hole known as the roofbox. The passageway has an amazing feature: although built from roughly-hewn rock, it is aligned in such a way that the rising sun shines through the roofbox, down the passageway, and lights up the central chamber on the morning of the Winter Solstice (21 or 22 December). This amazing fact was only discovered during the 19th Century and verified scientifically around 1960. While initially dismissed as coincidence, it is now generally accepted that the mound was designed with this in mind. It shows that the people of 5000 years ago were far more sophisticated than we generally think.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 5:41 am and is filed under Clothing, Cosmetics, Designers Sarees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.