Prehistoric Ireland: Newgrange

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Speaker 15 Deep in the verdant countryside, overlooking a sacred river, stands Ireland's most famous prehistoric monument. An enormous tomb made of stone and earth built more than 5,000 years ago.

Speaker 15 This stunning tomb lies at the heart of a special landscape known as Brune Boña, the poster monument in a valley of Stone Age marvels. Its name is Newgrange.

Speaker 15 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Today we're exploring this wonder of the Stone Age world that is Newgrange.

Speaker 15 There is still lots of mystery surrounding this massive passage tomb that has endured for five millennia, but thanks to the tireless work of archaeologists over the past decades, well, many of Newgrange's astonishing secrets have started to be revealed.

Speaker 15 It is a fascinating structure situated at the heart of an equally fascinating landscape of the utmost prehistoric importance.

Speaker 15 And it's also the subject of a brand new documentary presented by myself that has just dropped on History Hit. It's called Prehistoric Ireland Secrets of the Stone Age.

Speaker 15 So do check that out if you want after listening to this episode. Our guest for this episode is Dr.
Murray O'Sullivan, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at University College Dublin.

Speaker 15 Murrish is an expert on the many Stone Age monuments of Ireland, including Newgrange.

Speaker 15 He also features in our new documentary on the subject, so it felt right to have him on as our expert for this accompanying ancients episode.

Speaker 15 The story of Newgrange is one of stones and spirituality, of megaliths and mythology, of river travel and rock art.

Speaker 18 So let's get into it.

Speaker 15 Murray, it is great to have you on the podcast. It's good to see you again.

Speaker 18 Thank you very much, Tristan. It's very nice to be here as well.

Speaker 15 Now, not only, in my opinion, are you the unofficial winner of the smoothest Irish accent that I've ever heard, but you are also an expert on Newgrange.

Speaker 15 And surely this is one of the, if not the most famous prehistoric site in Ireland?

Speaker 18 Yeah, the most famous, I suspect, prehistoric site. It's obviously a World Heritage site, part of a World Heritage site, probably

Speaker 18 maybe the best known of the three because of the solstice, which we can speak about.

Speaker 18 And Nouth would be the other great one, but Newgrange would be the one that certainly would have been the first to be well known. It was excavated in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 18 The excavations there began around that time, but Nouth emerged in terms of archaeological information, slightly behind Newgrange in terms of information.

Speaker 15 And in regards to that, I mean, you mentioned names there like Nouth straight away. So shall we answer the big question straight away?

Speaker 15 i mean marish what exactly is new grange we can talk about nouth as well what exactly are these prehistoric monuments that we know the names of so well

Speaker 18 they are

Speaker 18 more or less circular mounds uh usually constituted of stone and soil and so on covering a megalithic tomb which is

Speaker 18 entered along a passage from the exterior uh into a chamber in the interior and this gives them the name passage tombs and the ones in the boind valley uh including Newgrange and Nouth, these are enormous,

Speaker 18 you know, maybe 80 meters across. Some of them, you know, they're quite 90 meters in the case of Nouth.

Speaker 18 They're very, very extensive and they contain an enormous amount of material apart from anything else.

Speaker 15 And that area, you mentioned the Boyne there, so we'll get to the river Boyne in a moment, but you mentioned, first of all, the word megalith. Now, what do we mean by the word megalith?

Speaker 15 I'm going back to my ancient Greek, and I think that's megas lithos. That is kind of a great stone idea, isn't it?

Speaker 18 Exactly.

Speaker 18 Large stones and these are enormous stones in the case of newgrange which would have the largest stones actually in the boin valley uh some of the curbstones there are approximately four meters long and maybe a meter high by sometimes almost a meter wide as well so an enormous mass of stone and they seem to have been collected round about the area uh they don't seem to have been quarried you know they may have been uh outcrops that were quarried but they weren't you know, the entire stone is not a quarried stone.

Speaker 18 It may have been broken off an outcrop or something like that. They're massive stones, and this is what gives its name.

Speaker 18 In the case of the Boyne Valley, you know, there are, I can't remember the number, but hundreds of these massive stones were collected to build the megalithic tombs.

Speaker 18 And that in itself is an enormous amount of labor, as you can imagine.

Speaker 15 These passage tombs and these great stones that have been built in the Boyne Valley some 5,000 years ago, Marish, I mean, is it part of a much wider tradition?

Speaker 15 When talking about this new Stone Age world, this Neolithic world, how far and wide should we be thinking that you can see a passage tomb like Newgrange?

Speaker 15 But I mean, but how far across the world should we also be thinking about passage tombs, similar style passage tombs at that time?

Speaker 18 Well, the megalithic tradition is was very much part of Western Europe, and it seems to have emerged around the same time that farming arrived.

Speaker 18 Now, there are megaliths in other parts of the world, like Japan and so forth. I think we'll just leave those aside and just deal with the Western European ones.

Speaker 18 And these ones in Western Europe, I think they spread from North Africa, certainly the Mediterranean islands, Iberia, France, especially Brittany, and then up into Ireland, Britain, some of the Scandinavian countries as well.

Speaker 18 So it's quite an extensive area. And within that,

Speaker 18 there is this passage tomb tradition, this particular type of tomb that has a passage leading into a chamber. And they're actually found across most of that area as well.

Speaker 18 But certainly in the Irish context, they are the most famous ones. And of course, in Britain, Orkney, especially Mice Howe and the various other ones there in Orkney.

Speaker 15 It always seems like Mace Howe and Newgrange and probably

Speaker 15 Nouth as well, they always seem to share that trophy of being the greatest Stone Age tomb surviving, isn't it?

Speaker 15 Whenever I put something up on social media or wherever about these tombs, they always say, oh, what about Newgrange? Or what about Macehow? They always seem to share that title.

Speaker 18 You know, both of them are very well known. And there seems to be a certain connection as well between Orkney and the Boyne Valley in the Stone Age, in the Neolithic.

Speaker 18 And of course, we're dealing with a period around 5,000 years ago. These tombs, especially the ones in the Boyne Valley, appear to have been built maybe sometime around 3,300 BC, 3, you know, 200 BC.

Speaker 18 And the Orkney ones ones are approximately the same time as well. So, and there seems to be some linkage because, and I'm switching from New Range to Nouth here for a second.

Speaker 18 I'm sorry about this, just at Nouth, it's a more extensive arrangement of tombs because, as well as the big mound at Nouth, you have 18 smaller ones, but also within the big mound at Nouth, you had two tombs, an east and a west tomb.

Speaker 18 And within the east tomb at Nouth, there was a very spectacular macehead found, which was featured in the Stonehenge exhibition in the British Museum a couple of years ago.

Speaker 18 And that mace head, everything about it would suggest that it may well come from Britain and maybe from Orkney. Most likely, perhaps in Britain, that it would have come from.
It's probably Orkney.

Speaker 15 Yes, we had a look at that macehead, I think, with creator Berners Gilhui in the National Museum of Ireland. And it's such an extraordinary artefact, isn't it?

Speaker 15 And do feel free to bring in Nouth once in a while during our chat because his story is so intertwined with Newgrange, especially when we get to topics like rock art.

Speaker 15 I want to bring in now, well, actually, I guess another big name to throw into this conversation straight away to help us all with the timeframe and just how old Newgrange is.

Speaker 15 If it was built like 3,200 BC, so more than 5,000 years ago, Marish, this is a monument that's older than both Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Speaker 15 It always feels like important to mention those two too, just to get the sense of just how old it is.

Speaker 18 People, as you say, typically throw out that piece of information or piece of data. The interesting thing about Newgrange

Speaker 18 and indeed Stonehenge, maybe more such Stonehenge than Newgrange, is that these sites... they weren't built in a day, you know, they evolved, you know.

Speaker 18 And in the case of Stonehenge, it's very interesting there that we know that Stonehenge evolved, you know, from the different phases of activity there and so on.

Speaker 18 Newgrange looks more like a job of work, so to speak, in the sense that you know there's a certain integration in the way it was built.

Speaker 18 And Newgrange, the actual mound at Newgrange, is surrounded by a circle of standing stones. And these standing stones, we assume it was a circle, only some of them remain.

Speaker 18 But the diameter across those standing stones is approximately the same as the diameter across Stonehenge, you know, the enclosing hinge there, you know.

Speaker 18 And it would appear that the evolution of Stonehenge encapsulates more or less the same timeframe as the evolution of Newgrange as a place, in the sense that Stonehenge began quite early, there was earlier activity on the site, and then it evolved into the great monument we know today.

Speaker 18 Now, that is later than Newgrange, but the actual site itself and its use as a special place

Speaker 18 would be around the same time as Newgrange, possibly even earlier in some cases.

Speaker 18 So I'm not sure that's slightly complicated, but you know, I think I would like to give credit to Stonehenge, so to speak, as well as Newgrange.

Speaker 15 Well, okay, but that's fair enough.

Speaker 15 We're never going to shy away from giving credit to the amazing achievements of Stonehenge, but we'll also focus on the amazing achievements of Newgrange and those people who built it.

Speaker 15 Let's talk a bit about the wider landscape of Newgrange. You've mentioned it is situated in the Boyne River Valley.
But Murray, I've got in my notes, obviously the name Bruna Boyne.

Speaker 15 So give us a sense of the wider landscape that Newgrange is built within and why that landscape is really important when discussing its story.

Speaker 18 Well, Newgrange is located in County Meath in Ireland, north of Dublin, and it's a particularly fertile area of Ireland with very good land. So I suppose that's the first thing to bear in mind.

Speaker 18 And through it flows the River Boyne, which is not the longest river in Ireland, but for some reason seems to be the one that mythologically seems to have been the most significant over time.

Speaker 18 This most sacred river kind of Ireland. It's a very sacred river, and lots of our legendary stories and mythology in Ireland reference the River Boyne.

Speaker 18 And indeed, the name Boyne itself, the Irish version of the River Boyne, the Gaelic version, it references a goddess in the

Speaker 18 pantheon, so to speak, of Irish mythology. And the sort of same name as the river itself, this goddess was the mother of Ingus.
And you mentioned Bru and the Boinia.

Speaker 18 The Bru is actually the stronghold or the sort of palace or the homestead of the god Angus. It's the fortress of the Boin, so to speak.

Speaker 18 And it's supposed to have been inhabited by the god Angus, a member of the Tuha Dedonant, the pre-Celtic people in the understanding of those people, or the pre-Irish, really.

Speaker 18 Angus was the son of Boyne herself, of the river Boyne, and of the great Celtic god, the Dogdar, the great Tua, the Dongan god. So, in mythology alone, it's actually a very significant place.

Speaker 18 Now, what's very interesting about that is that the other sites in the Boyne Valley, Newgray, are Nouth and Douth, and indeed the newly discovered site at Douth Hall, which is underneath an 18th-century period house, that these, yeah, these three sites,

Speaker 18 they all show signs of a lot of activity in early medieval times with suterrains, underground passages being built into the mounds.

Speaker 18 In the case of Nouth, houses were being built on the edge of the mound and indeed on part of the mound.

Speaker 18 And all of this early medieval activity, in the case of Nouth, caused quite some instability within the megalithic tomb because they were robbing stones and

Speaker 18 so on. They were in and out of the tombs or writing graffiti in them.
But strangely enough, not at Newgrange. There's no evidence at Newgrange of this sort of intensive early medieval activity.

Speaker 18 And I often wonder if that's to do with the fact that it's associated with this god Aingus, and it's a very special place in mythology.

Speaker 18 So it may well have protected the site. So that's, so to speak, the...

Speaker 18 And the reason I'm going on about this is that the boin, of course, seems to have been a key factor in the location of these tombs, because the other group of tombs is at Loch Crewe, over in the western part of County Meath, and these overlook the valley of the Blackwater River, which actually is a tributary of the River Boyne.

Speaker 18 So the whole network seems to have been significant, the Boyne, but especially the River Boyne itself.

Speaker 18 Then the other aspect of this is that the River Boyne flows eastwards through County Meath

Speaker 18 from Slane towards Drahada, some miles to the east east of Slane. And on its way, it meets a ridge, which causes it to turn south and to loop around, giving us the famous name, the Bend of the Boyne.

Speaker 15 The Bend in the Boyne or the Bend.

Speaker 18 And this ridge is a sort of an east-west ridge. And on that ridge, the three highest points on that ridge, these are the points at which Newgrange and Nouth and Douth are built.

Speaker 18 So the landscapes played a key role.

Speaker 15 So it's interesting, and to imagine in the Stone Age world, 5,000 years ago, the River Boyne, as you mentioned, good agricultural land there, fishing, boats, people coming up and down that river.

Speaker 15 When they're going along that bend in the Boyne, if those three big tombs, Newgrange, Nouth, and Douth, are on those highest points of the ridges, I mean, it almost feels like they're Stone Age billboards.

Speaker 15 They can be seen by people going up and down that, if I keep on that kind of analogy, that motorway of the Stone Age, which was the River Boyne.

Speaker 18 Absolutely.

Speaker 18 And indeed, I think you've touched on something really significant: that apart from visiting these sites individually, a wonderful coach tour is to drive along the south side of the River Boyne, the other side of the river, and you actually see the three tombs on the ridges above you, especially Newgrange and North This down, particularly, as you're actually travelling along.

Speaker 18 And the road runs along the valley of the river, just beside the river. The vista from the river would have been very significant and the journey up the river.

Speaker 18 Of course, the other thing about the River Boyne is is that it's a very strong fishing river, and presumably it was like this always as well: salmon and so forth, you know.

Speaker 18 So, and eel, I think, might have played a role as well. It's a food resource as well for the River Boyne.

Speaker 15 So, Newgrange, of all of these monuments in Brunei Boyne, and I'm sure we'll probably talk about some of the later ones in time too. I've got in my notes that there are some 40 still visible,

Speaker 15 more than 100, like were originally monuments on this area. The people themselves, Maurice, who built Newgrange, do we have any idea who these people were?

Speaker 18 Well, in some ways, we know them a lot through the tombs. In other ways, they are mysterious people.

Speaker 18 Possibly because what they placed in the tombs, they didn't seem to have placed in their to have had in their daily lives.

Speaker 18 So they are mysterious.

Speaker 18 If you take something like the Boyne Valley, in spite of, you know, a lot of work has been done and feed working has taken place and, you know, flint working has been found etc.

Speaker 18 But really, you would have thought that something as enormous as these great mounds and the work involved in them would have involved quite a large workforce of some kind and indeed people to oversee that, all of which seems to suggest some sort of intensive settlement of some kind.

Speaker 18 But there's really no evidence of this settlement. We don't see anything like a village or,

Speaker 18 you know, it's hard to know. So some people have explained this by saying that perhaps it was nomadic.

Speaker 18 In other words, that a lot of the people who worked at New Range or were buried at New Range something may have lived somewhere else.

Speaker 18 These may have been traditional places to which they brought the dead or something like that. It's very tricky.
It's very difficult to know. Of course,

Speaker 18 we assume they were farmers, you know, or there was certainly a farming economy underlying this massive output because farming had come to Ireland maybe six or seven hundred years earlier before the tombs in the eastern part of Ireland were built.

Speaker 18 The ones in County Sligo in the west, like Carrow Moor and Carrokeel, they were built a couple of centuries earlier, or they certainly started a few centuries earlier.

Speaker 18 But it was really in the context of this arrival of farming and the spread of farming through Ireland and the consolidation of farming within Ireland that the megalithic tombs emerged, and particularly then the spectacular ones, the passage tombs.

Speaker 18 The interesting thing is that one of the ways that we know a little bit about them is through DNA research. One particular

Speaker 18 skull fragment from Newgrange, you know, has allowed geneticists to build a sort of a profile of the individual, a genetic profile of the individual.

Speaker 18 And it would appear that this person was related to some people from the Caramore tombs and also people who were found at Millenbay and Coughty Down.

Speaker 15 There's a bit of mobility there, exactly.

Speaker 18 Yeah, which suggests mobility and perhaps also a sort of a stratum in society that may have been operating or interlinking with each other rather than with society at large.

Speaker 18 You know, some people have suggested it was a nobility or something like that, but it's difficult to know. But they are slightly elusive otherwise.

Speaker 18 You know, it's difficult, you know, in the case of other types of megalithic tombs in Ireland, they tend to occur where there is sort of farming settlement and amongst fields, in the case of Acadia Fields in County Mayo.

Speaker 18 But the Boyne Valley ones, they're found very often, not just Boyne Valley, but pastor tombs generally, they're often found on locations like the tops of ridges or close to the tops of hills or along river valleys or something like that.

Speaker 18 They seem to have had the ability to choose where they wanted to place these monuments, which which again suggests power of some sort

Speaker 15 absolutely does and it's also very interesting first of all you hinted about that dna analysis which we will return to later on especially with these interesting links uh to irish mythology too

Speaker 15 but does it then seem to be that early on in the story of bruna boynia and newgrange when it's initially built Do we think that these early farmers, they view this area, Marish, primarily, if not centrally, as a place place for the dead, as a cemetery.

Speaker 15 I know as time goes on, it gets more complicated than that.

Speaker 15 But if they're just building these great tombs, do they think, first of all, that that landscape is primarily an area, what they would see as a cemetery, a very elaborate cemetery almost?

Speaker 18 I think you're right. Like they certainly are making a statement in the landscape.
That's the first thing.

Speaker 18 And in my own imagination, this is a purely personal view, you know, trying to come to terms with why these things happen, so to speak.

Speaker 18 One of the interesting things about the passage tombs is some of them occur high up on tops of hills, Balting Last Hill in County Wicklow, for example, or Nocknery in County Sligo.

Speaker 18 And where these tombs have been excavated, there is evidence of pre-tomb activity at the sites,

Speaker 18 which suggests that it's not the tomb made the place sacred, that the tomb is just a particular expression of the sacredness of the site.

Speaker 18 So the way I like to see it for what it's worth is that I imagine this world of farming spreading and more trees being cut down and

Speaker 18 countryside being opened up and

Speaker 18 these traditional sacred places, the nature of them and the sort of landscape context of them, if you had to put it that way, being changed by farming and sacred places almost coming under threat.

Speaker 18 And I often wonder: was the building of a megalithic tomb on these places almost a way of stabilizing the places and saying this is a sacred place you know now that's just a personal sort of way of expressing it and they may not even have thought that way but you wonder if it was one of those impetuses that may have been going on and this is why these monuments they're often designed especially pasta tombs to be seen from far away and they interlink across the country from mountaintop to mountaintop in some cases.

Speaker 18 I'm just thinking of particular cases where in the evening, maybe when the sun is beginning to drop in the sky and you're in the landscape, maybe within 10 miles of these,

Speaker 18 the mound or the cairn on top of the mountain stands out so strongly, you know, it's very startly.

Speaker 18 And these were obviously designed to be seen and they obviously sent a statement.

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Speaker 15 We're about to explore that whole building process of Newgrange and other places like Nouth and what archaeologists believe was the likely way that they built these monuments.

Speaker 15 First off, Marish, though, I must ask, do we know how long it would have taken for them back in the Stone Age roughly to build something like Newgrange?

Speaker 15 Because I remember going to Orkley and learning about places like Mays Howe and also people saying that the amount of labour needed, the amount of time needed, the whole building of the tomb itself might have been just as important as the burial because it's important to their society and it's such a huge event, a huge task.

Speaker 18 Michael J.

Speaker 18 O'Kelly made an effort to try to quantify how long it would have taken, you know, and I think he had a, I think he was talking about maybe if you had a workforce of about 300, et cetera, that you would take maybe about six years to build a new grange.

Speaker 18 I think that was something like that he gave us a figure, you know. But it's very difficult for us today.
I've seen, I mean, anyone who has worked in the field, so to speak,

Speaker 18 and I'm from a farming background myself as well, in addition to the archaeology, that people who work with particular types of material become very adept at handling the material.

Speaker 18 I've even seen at Nouth, for example, where there was a lot of stone being moved around as it's all on by the people working on the site by hand.

Speaker 18 They became extraordinary at moving large stones around, rolling them on boughs of trees and so forth. And I think that's one of the things to take into account.

Speaker 18 But then, as against that, they didn't have the facilities we would have today. They didn't have wheed vehicles, for example, never mind anything mechanical.

Speaker 18 They didn't have horses at the time in Ireland. So they were moving the stuff without a lot of the modern facilities.

Speaker 18 And some of these stones they moved were absolutely extraordinarily large stones, which in some cases were brought from quite far away.

Speaker 18 And, you know, I always sometimes think it's so funny like that, having brought these stones from wherever, you know, they arrived down there.

Speaker 18 Maybe if they came along the board, whatever way they came along, they said, well, while we're at it, let's bring them up to the top of the hill.

Speaker 18 That's the thing.

Speaker 15 You can ferry them along the river, but then you've got to get to the top of that massive ridge.

Speaker 18 Absolutely, yeah. And I indeed, I often think, and I'm straying into something slightly different, so bear with me for a second.

Speaker 18 The journey of each of these stones must have been in itself quite a saga, you know, and something that was remembered by people.

Speaker 18 You know, the actual, they must have remembered particular stones and someone's toe got crushed or whatever, you know, in the exercise, you know, that each of these stones had a story by the time it got up to the site.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 there is evidence that they were locating stones in specific places, you know, very deliberately looking for particular types of stone.

Speaker 18 In the case of the Mine Valley, they would travel quite a distance to find the stone they wanted.

Speaker 18 And then they brought that to the site and they organized the stone in the architecture, presumably in a meaningful way. So, particular types of stone tend to occur in particular places.

Speaker 18 And this suggests that stone had meaning for them, and possibly the places from which they extracted the stone had meaning as well. And in the way that you might bring

Speaker 18 material, it often carries this kind of significance, like people bringing water back from Lourd or something like that.

Speaker 18 You know, that it's a material often carries significance for people, or they carry stones. We discussed this actually another time that

Speaker 18 in my own case, we're from County Kerry in the west, the southwest of Ireland, living in County Wicklow,

Speaker 18 but it's very significant to bring a stone from West Kerry to County Wicklow.

Speaker 18 And it carries a sort of a significance because of where it's from, especially it's from if it's from an ancestral place or something like that.

Speaker 18 People would do things like place that on the tombs of parents and grandparents and so forth.

Speaker 18 And this often happens with emigrants as well. So this sort of thing that happens today, I presume the same would have gone on in the Stone Age and stone carried a certain significance for them.

Speaker 15 Well, let's do one particular example of this, of a particular stone that they used a lot of and kind of epitomizes that journey from source to Brune-Boyne, and let's say with the building of Newgrange.

Speaker 15 You probably know what I'm going to ask, Marish, which is the Cloverhead Cliffs.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 15 Now, Marish, what are these cliffs and how do they relate to Newgrange and the building of Newgrange?

Speaker 18 Claherhead is just north of Dundalk Bay. It's on the northern side there

Speaker 18 on the Cardigford Peninsula.

Speaker 18 Basically, many of the stones used at Newgrange, the evidence seems to suggest that these, some of the larger stones that I'm speaking about, they appear to have come from Claherhead, which is quite a journey, about 30 miles or something like that, to have brought them to the Boyne Valley.

Speaker 18 I mentioned earlier there were a very large number of stones used in the Boyne Valley between all of the tombs there, but it would appear that Newgrange got the pick of the stones.

Speaker 18 because the largest curbstones, for example, there are also some of the finest stones, as stones, are to be found along the curb at Newgrange.

Speaker 15 The curb says, yeah, yeah, do you define there? So like think of like a curb, they surround the perimeter of Newgrange don't they?

Speaker 18 Yeah, this circle of they're at the base of the cairn, so to speak.

Speaker 18 Some people say they're holding the cairn in, but I suspect their function was more you know, ceremonial defining the circular, more or less circular area within which the tomb was built and all of the main activity was taking place.

Speaker 18 That brings you to another angle when you're speaking about it. Maybe I'm taking you away, actually, Tristan, so please pull me back.

Speaker 18 But when they were building these tombs, it began with the alignment of the tomb. And I think that's an important point to make because.
That's a good starting point, yes.

Speaker 18 Yeah, they had to know in advance the direction in which the passage was facing.

Speaker 18 Because, in the case of Newgrange, they were facing the passage towards this spot on the horizon where the sun would rise at midwinter.

Speaker 15 Ah, the winter solstice link. Okay.
Yes.

Speaker 18 And this was their first, so to speak, that line was important to them. And then the actual enclosing of this circular space or this more or less circular space was also, for some reason, important.

Speaker 18 And they were the two key spatial things, so to speak, in the layout of the tombs. And everything seems to have begun from there.

Speaker 11 Right.

Speaker 15 So that makes sense.

Speaker 15 So they kind of plot out the position where the central chamber will be, as you say, to align with the solstice and we'll get more to that then the whole perimeter it's almost kind of like stone age surveyors kind of thing isn't it

Speaker 15 you're planning it all out and then they go and get the stones from places like cloth ahead and do we know much about that process because to me i love logistic stuff whether it's military or or building or whatever from ancient history do we know get any sense of that whole logistical process of the ferrying of those great stones from a place like the Clothahead cliffs and then back to Newgrange It's assumed that the river was used as a way of moving them and maybe the sea as well.

Speaker 18 But this is a precarious business with very large stones.

Speaker 18 And the other thing that I remember some years ago, some colleagues, they conducted a survey of the riverbed along the River Boyne because the assumption was if so many large stones were moved somewhere along the way, one had to be lost.

Speaker 15 Must have been some shipwreck

Speaker 18 or two or whatever. So they were checking if anything like that could be seen.
What they found were actually a very large number of circular stones, which turned out to be tires.

Speaker 18 This is all the

Speaker 18 came out of course.

Speaker 18 There seems to have been nothing lost along the way. So if

Speaker 18 whether this is a sign that they were particularly good in terms of how they managed all this process, or maybe it suggests that it wasn't along the river at all, that it might have been some other way they came.

Speaker 18 We don't really know, but we know that they got the stone from A to B.

Speaker 18 It was quite a challenge because they either had to go around Dundalk Bay or go across Dundalk Bay or something like that. They had to find some way of getting the material in, you know.

Speaker 18 So it was a tricky process. And these were enormous stones, and then they had to deal with the rivers along the way, whether they brought them along the rivers or across the rivers.

Speaker 18 But it was massive. And this had to be done with, in the case of the Boyne Valley, I count hundreds and hundreds of large stones, each travelling individually.

Speaker 15 And also to extract the rocks. I mean, there's no metals at this time.
So is it just hammering the rock with an even bigger rock kind of thing? Hammer stones again and again and again?

Speaker 18 Hammer stones, and presumably using fire and water maybe to break them as well.

Speaker 18 But then you have to use this sort of activity carefully because you don't want to damage the actual stone you're using or leave that all cracked and so forth.

Speaker 18 So they they seem to have known what they were at.

Speaker 18 But then everything about these people tells me that they knew what they were at because the whole logistics, as you say, of bringing these large stones and extracting them and placing them in position and so forth, that was an enormous exercise.

Speaker 18 The strange thing about it is that I always think that if you take a pebble from the seaside, a small pebble that's

Speaker 18 maybe five millimeters across, or at most, maybe seven or eight millimeters across.

Speaker 18 And now without modern technology, you now have the job of actually boring a hole through the center of that pebble in order to make a bead.

Speaker 18 And I think that's an extraordinary sort of a piece of activity, so to speak, by someone back in the Stone Age. And they have done this repeatedly.
So presumably they had techniques.

Speaker 18 I think if you place that then onto a larger scale with the megalithic tombs, they knew how to handle stone.

Speaker 18 But what's maybe spectacular and maybe remarkable about all of this is that going back to their who they were and so forth, we have no evidence that these people lived in strong houses of any type or stone houses, even in the case of Ireland.

Speaker 18 They seem to have lived in relatively flimsy buildings, as far as we can make out. And yet they went from that to building these enormous megalithic structures.

Speaker 18 There's a sort of a dichotomy, so to speak, in the actual daily life of these people as we know it or as we don't know it, and then these remarkable structures they've left behind.

Speaker 15 Let's get back towards the monument. Let's say they have been able to bring some of these curbstones back.

Speaker 15 I might also have to ask the question: do we think potentially when they're starting to arrange some of these stones, we'll get back to the curbstones in a moment, but let's say stones for the creating of the chamber itself or the roof.

Speaker 15 Could we imagine the equivalent of Stone Age Age scaffolding or ramps or stuff like that being used to try and help them?

Speaker 18 I think so. Yeah, they certainly would have used, I think, these types of things because they couldn't otherwise have done it, I think.
You know,

Speaker 18 certainly they were using ramps, I suspect. The other thing is that in other places in Brittany and so forth, where they were dealing with large stones, I'm thinking of Latabe Marshan, there, where

Speaker 18 there was a sort of alignment there beside it, that that you were able to see evidence of them dealing with the stone, so to speak.

Speaker 18 Whereas, in the case of these passage tombs, they didn't leave traces behind of the types of ramps or whatever they were using to build these monuments.

Speaker 18 I've seen various attempts to explain how they might have done it. You know, as you say, scaffolding, ramps.

Speaker 18 Some people have suggested that the interior might have been filled with something like sand and then the thing built on top of it.

Speaker 18 But I always think that all of that is very well, but ultimately, someone had to take away these things, this scaffolding or sand.

Speaker 18 And you needed to predict what would happen at that stage, I think. And I think that's the genius of these people.

Speaker 18 In the case of the corballed roof at Newgrange, as you know,

Speaker 18 it's this high corballed roof,

Speaker 18 ending with a flat stone across the top. The way this corballing was done is that, first of all, the stones leaned slightly outwards and downwards.
So there's a slight angle in them.

Speaker 18 And the weight of each of these stones was behind, so to speak.

Speaker 18 So, when you're inside a new range, you see what look like boulders, maybe you know, less than a meter across and maybe 20, 30 meters or centimeters, something like that, deep, or whatever.

Speaker 18 But in fact,

Speaker 18 this is misleading because what actually happens is we're seeing, in the case of this corbling, in each case, the front of a much larger stone, and the bulk of the weight of that stone is behind and sort of sloping slightly downwards so that each layer of corbeling is put up in this way and then it's the weight of the cairn behind it that keeps this corballing in place as it gradually moves inwards to oversail the space of the care of the chamber and then at the very top this flat stone is put across which i suppose emphasizes the fact that this is not an arch but a corbal system which is slightly different building technology What is remarkable is that in the case of both Newgrange and Nauth, these corbel chambers have stayed intact for the past 5,000 years and more.

Speaker 15 It's absolutely fascinating that. And the corbeling technique is absolutely remarkable.

Speaker 18 They used a sort of,

Speaker 18 I can't quite remember the materials they used, but it was some, you know, a mixture of various things to actually

Speaker 18 seal the spaces.

Speaker 18 And they also had little channels on tops of these corbels at the back so that the water ran off them. So they went to quite some trouble to waterproof them in those cases.

Speaker 15 So, maybe for some 5,000 years or so before O'Kelly and his excavations earlier in the century, maybe

Speaker 15 you rarely, if ever, had water seeping into that central chamber. That's quite a fact.

Speaker 18 Exactly, yes, yeah. Yeah, oh, wow, okay, that's extraordinary.

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Speaker 15 We need to move on. You mentioned a bit about the interior there.
So, just to refresh, it's about a 19-meter-long corridor, isn't it? With these big slabs of stone either side, these author stats.

Speaker 15 And then you emerge into this central area with three recesses in the central area where we believe the remains of the people were placed.

Speaker 18 Absolutely.

Speaker 18 And the three recesses, again, that bring me back to the people if you want to, Tristan, but just to highlight the fact that the three recesses are also organized in a particular way.

Speaker 18 Obviously, it creates a cruciform effect.

Speaker 18 But generally, in these pastorums, the right-hand recess is given preeminence in terms of size, ornamentation, elaboration, and sometimes the contents of that side.

Speaker 18 It's an interesting dimension of Pastor Schumes, this emphasis in Ireland on the right-hand side,

Speaker 18 the preeminence of the right-hand side, because this is a cross-cultural phenomenon. It's found in many cultures, including modern Christian culture, you know, or in Europe.

Speaker 18 Right is associated with the best things, you know, in many ways, at the right hand of God, you know, this type of thing. Right as righteousness.
It's always a metaphor for something better.

Speaker 18 And in many languages, including Irish and English, even the terminology for right and left and in other languages, they're often associated with goodness and

Speaker 18 more positive and less positive things. This metaphorical use of right and left, of the two sides.
So they seem to have used it as well for some purpose.

Speaker 18 Of course, the problem is we don't quite know what it means, but everything about it suggests that the right-hand side was seen as the more positive side.

Speaker 15 Well, talking about that kind of mystery element to it, we've still got a couple of things to cover with the whole kind of architecture of Newgrange and that time period.

Speaker 15 And one of the things, it kind of goes to three again with certain cases, isn't it, that it's not just a plain

Speaker 15 interior chamber. And the same with some of the curbstones as well, because you also find rock art.
And Marish, what types of rock art are we talking about?

Speaker 18 It's a very distinctive type that's found in Ireland, made up almost universally of abstract motifs, geometric, schematic type of um designs, circles, spirals, zigzags, lozenges, you know, cup marks, of course, according but these are

Speaker 18 universal, so to speak, cup marks. But yeah, it's that type of thing.

Speaker 18 Now it's a it's part of a much wider European rock art tradition, you know, that uh particularly in the Iberian Peninsula, you get a a type of stone or or a type of decoration on stone out in the landscape in the open air that is very similar to actually some of the megalithic art in the pastums in Ireland.

Speaker 18 In fact, I would suggest that some of the pastum art in Ireland is much closer to that open-air rock art in Iberia in some cases

Speaker 18 than it is to other pastitum traditions in Europe.

Speaker 15 And Marsh is this so-called Atlantic rock art.

Speaker 18 Atlantic rock art, very much so. Yeah,

Speaker 18 when you think of Atlantic rock art,

Speaker 18 you're thinking of the type of rock art that's found in Yorkshire and Northumberland, and then in the Galicia and Spain and so forth. It's quite common.

Speaker 15 Kilmartin Glenn, yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, Kilmartin Glenn, exactly. Now, that's a more restricted form of art than what's found in the pastums.
The pastums designs are slightly different.

Speaker 18 They're actually more sophisticated, you know, in terms of aesthetics and so forth.

Speaker 18 You know, you think of the New Grange entrance stone and also some of the negative art in Brisbane and other places like Gavrinis, etc. You know, it's actually quite sophisticated type of artwork.

Speaker 18 And they seem in some cases to almost move away from the geometric designs into in the case of Nouth, particularly in the Boin Valley, where they seem to kind of get carried away with making designs and running along the shoulders of stones and things like that.

Speaker 18 And they sort of lose touch with the geometric sort of origins of the artwork, which is very interesting.

Speaker 15 It is. And almost as a teaser, you and I, in our upcoming documentary on Prehistoric Island, part of that, we explore that rock art outside Nouth.

Speaker 15 And I think you said Nouth is like the richest concentration of megalithic rock art in Europe. It's an astonishing tomb.
And there is still some on Newgrange as well.

Speaker 15 If I bring you back to Newgrange, you mentioned the entrance stone there, which for our listeners, that was perhaps the best of the curbstones in the fact that that it's right outside the main entrance to Newgrange and it is covered in spirals and beautiful rock art, including a particular type which I'm sure is perhaps, well, the best known, isn't it, because of its later legacy, this idea of the triple spiral,

Speaker 15 which seems to become, dare I say, it has in late history become associated with the word Celtic and kind of a Celtic symbol, even though it's much older than that, the famous triple spiral motif.

Speaker 18 Absolutely, yes.

Speaker 18 And of course, it's it's repeated then in the case of new grange inside in the end chamber as well on one of the stones there there's a very famous example of it there as well it's an extraordinary um feature of the megalithic art in the boine valley that the richest concentration is to be found at north and in fact i always think of nouth as this place where they're developing the art and you know they're experimenting and pushing the boundaries.

Speaker 18 But probably the finest example of megalithic art in the Boyne Valley is that New Grange entrance stone.

Speaker 18 And very much not far behind it is curbstone 52 at the back of Newgrange.

Speaker 18 And then there is Curbstone 67 at New Grange. These are the three big decorated curbstones.
There are other decorated curbstones in Newgrange, but these three stand apart.

Speaker 18 And what's interesting about them is that if you were to take away those three from New Grange, you would say that the megalithic art at New Grange, especially on the curbs, is not in the same league as the megalithic art at Nouth, you know.

Speaker 18 But these ones lift Newgrange, and actually, there's certainly curbstone one, the entrance stone, and the one directly across from it, curbstone 52.

Speaker 18 And remember that these are the ones that are on the axis of the rising sun.

Speaker 18 And, you know, if you drew a line through the site and through the passage, and these are probably the two finest, among the finest pieces of megalithic art in the Boyne Valley.

Speaker 15 There's one part of the construction of Newgrange that I'm sure many people who are listening to this, who have visited Newgrange, will be maybe shouting into their podcast, into their audio apps, say, what about this?

Speaker 15 What about this part? And so I must ask about this part as well, briefly. And it is interesting, which is that massive quartz wall.

Speaker 15 Marish around the outside, that kind of white wall of Newgrange that is one of the most, I mean, eye-catching parts of photos and images of Newgrange today. How accurate do we think that is?

Speaker 15 Do we think think that was part of the original build?

Speaker 18 Well, I think to start, if Newgrange had been excavated in recent times and were then reconstituted, so to speak, or reinstated, we would not have that white quartz wall because the system nowadays or the philosophy behind reinstating monuments after excavation is that you put it back the way you found it.

Speaker 18 You don't try to interpret how it might have looked originally on the basis that the whole life story of the site is important.

Speaker 18 But at the time, this was there were very good reasons for reconstituting it in this way at the time. This was back in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 18 That O'Kelly did do, he conducted engineering experiments with engineers on how the wall might have stood and fallen and so on. And he related that to what he found on the ground.

Speaker 18 And he certainly found all of that quartz on the ground, more or less in front of the curb at Newgrange.

Speaker 18 And the way it was sort of wedged in a sort of a wedge shape so to speak thinning out as it went out suggested it had fallen from above to him now it's very controversial and people have queried and questioned it and so on the interesting thing is that as you mentioned there that quartz wall has become so much part of newgrange in the consciousness of people across the world at this stage that probably it has to be left there, you know, that it was of its time.

Speaker 18 It was a way of restoring a monument at the time.

Speaker 18 And in Ferris, all of this quartz was found there, and indeed those rounded stones that were found amongst the quartz, they were all found on site on the ground in front of the kerbstone.

Speaker 18 The one thing that might be of interest is that O'Kelly did point out that he did find stones on tops of the kerbstones.

Speaker 18 In an excavation I conducted myself at Nokroan County, Kilkenny, there was one particular curbstone that had split, you know, and the front half half of it had fallen forward,

Speaker 18 rather like a kebab, you know, sort of.

Speaker 18 And the filling of the space between the front half of that curbstone and the back half of it was all clean white quartz, which suggested to me that the quartz also may have fallen from above somewhere.

Speaker 18 It couldn't jump up from the ground and jump into this space, so to speak. You know, something seems to have fallen from above.
Now, that doesn't mean it was a vertical wall.

Speaker 18 I think that's the most controversial aspect of the Newgrange reconstruction: is that the wall is so high. It's not quite vertical, but it's very close to being vertical.

Speaker 18 The suggestion would be that if there were some quartz on top of the curbstones, it may not have been

Speaker 18 as sheer as that, so to speak.

Speaker 15 I'm glad that we mentioned it because

Speaker 15 it would be wrong of us not to. And thank you for highlighting that.
Maybe quartz like with the curbstones, that particular stone had a real significance for these people.

Speaker 15 This feels slightly unfair because I feel the legacy of Newgrange is deserving of a full podcast episode in its own right, Marish.

Speaker 15 But as time goes on, the Stone Age goes on, then you get the Bronze Age and the whole area in this Bend in the Bond, the Brune-Boigne, this sacred landscape full of...

Speaker 15 timber circles and henges and people venturing there from far and wide. I mean, Marish, give us an insight into that legacy of Newgrange and what follows.

Speaker 15 I I mean, I've got even in my notes here some Roman coins were found there too. It's quite extraordinary.

Speaker 18 Exactly.

Speaker 18 And an aspect of the Boyne Valley that maybe was understated in the past, but has become clearer in more recent times that these massive henge-like monuments that were built in the valley below Newgrange, they would have involved a similar amount of labor and input of resources, but in timber, as the actual megalithic tombs had.

Speaker 18 They were built perhaps somewhere, you know, maybe some hundreds of years after the megalithic tombs.

Speaker 18 But they do indicate, as you say, that this was a very sacred landscape with a lot of activity going on there. But then it runs out.
Then it just dies after the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Speaker 18 You know, when I say dies, that you have no more this massive input of activity and construction and so on in the Boyne Valley.

Speaker 18 And there seems to have been some sort of a lull through the Bronze Age in some ways, you know.

Speaker 18 But then in the early centuries AD, for some reason, there's material from Roman Britain is placed in front of the tomb at Newgrange in the form of coins, gold coins for about the third or fourth century.

Speaker 18 I think they're

Speaker 18 third and fourth century, maybe.

Speaker 18 There's a pair of bronze brooches from, I think, the third century. There were some neck ornaments and other things, you know, of gold.

Speaker 18 So, and this is material that seems to have come from provincial, provincial, you know, the edge of the Roman Empire, Britain, presumed to be Britain.

Speaker 18 And they are placed at those standing stones in front of the entrance to Newgrange, it would appear.

Speaker 18 So, this seems to indicate some sort of a significance for the sites. And it's part of an upsurge of activity that took place at these megalithic tombs during the later Iron Age.

Speaker 18 This is about between three and three and a half thousand years after they were actually built in the first place. So, for some reason, people are coming back.

Speaker 18 There were burials being placed at many of these sites. We have found, you know, fairly consistently, you find evidence of Iron Age activity at these sites, as if they were still important.

Speaker 18 And mentioning the Roman material, there was also Roman material at the Hill of Tara around a passage tomb there, which is known as the Mound of the Hostages, another very rich passage tomb in terms of its contents and so on.

Speaker 18 And there as well,

Speaker 18 beside it at the Wrath of the Synods, which is the site excavated by the British Israelites, but that's a slight distraction.

Speaker 18 There were found actually some glass, Roman glass, and other and ceramics, you know, that were have been identified as being largely drinking ware and

Speaker 18 as if banqueting was taking place or something like that at these sites.

Speaker 18 So between burial, banqueting, the laying of, you know, sort of votive offerings or something that, there seems to have attracted people in the Iron Age.

Speaker 18 Now, what the motivation for that was is very difficult to know.

Speaker 15 It's still interesting, and actually, it leads me into a fun little statement to almost before we completely wrap this up.

Speaker 15 There is sometimes that common phrase, in fact, said that Cleopatra is living, the famous Cleopatra is living closer to us than the time of when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

Speaker 15 Well, those coins, those Roman coins, were left at Newgrange closer to us today than when Newgrange was originally built, which I think is a nice statement to kind of testament to that legacy part of it as well.

Speaker 15 I mean, Marish, I could ask you about so much more. Sadly, we don't have time to cover, explore a bit more that DNA link and mythology.

Speaker 15 But I will ask you, personally, what excites you the most about Newgrange?

Speaker 15 For a site that's 5,000 years old, it still seems to be one shrouded in mystery that is, you know, more and more evidence is coming to light.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I think that's exactly the point. That the more we delve into these monuments, the more we realize how little we have known about them and how much more there is to be had.

Speaker 18 I mean, the example of the DNA was a good example, but also we have found, for example, that in examining material very closely that's coming from these sites, that they seem to have treated human bone in very distinctive ways.

Speaker 18 You know, it wasn't just a matter of cremating the person and putting them into the tomb. There's evidence that, you know, there was mixing of bones going on.

Speaker 18 There's evidence that the artifacts that are found with them were not simply artifacts they happened to be wearing, so therefore ended up sort of almost accidentally in the tombs.

Speaker 18 There's evidence that certainly in some of the cases that when they burned, cremated the remains, some people have often suggested the bone and antler pins were keeping cloaks closed or whatever, you know.

Speaker 18 Experiments have shown that if these had been on the bodies when they were cremated, they would have disappeared.

Speaker 18 They would not have survived the burning. So it seems like they were placed into the ashes at a later stage because they are charred, but they're not burnt out away completely.

Speaker 18 There's also evidence, for example, that beads and pendants that were used at some of the tombs, they're made from stone that does not occur locally, but is brought from far away.

Speaker 18 So in the case of Tara, for example, some of the pendants there are made from serpentine. And serpentine is not found locally in the County Meath area, but comes from the west of Ireland.

Speaker 18 And similarly at Knock Row in County Kilkenny, the beads there, when we examine them in detail, the majority of the beads are a very large, yeah, the majority were made from steatite, which is a type of stone that's not again found in southeast Ireland, but actually comes again from the northwest, from Galway, Donegal, Mayo, that type of area.

Speaker 18 So there's a lot to be discovered.

Speaker 18 We've also found that the most common artefact may well be in these tombs, a bone tubular bead that has been really just mentioned in, you know, but hasn't really been examined, but has been examined more recently by Dr.

Speaker 18 Ruth Cardin.

Speaker 18 And she has found that this bead is generally made from bird bone, very elaborately carved at the terminals, both inside and out, but also that some of them are made from deer antler and that to make a tubular bead of dirantler was a very elaborate process, involving cutting off a little rectangle of the zanter from the outer part, somehow or other softening it, curving it around into a cylinder, and using it.

Speaker 18 And then we find these because you can identify them very easily with the sort of

Speaker 18 gap along one side of them where the two pieces came together. So we could go on and on about this.
In other words, everything is very elaborate that's done in them.

Speaker 18 And we're just really finding out about these people.

Speaker 15 Well, you know, this is great in its own right because it means we can do follow-up episodes on Prehistoric Island and Nokro, like places where you've done your excavations as well in the future too, Marish.

Speaker 15 And of course, Nouth and Douth, two other great tombs that we mentioned in passing. But obviously, the focus was on Newgrange.

Speaker 15 Marish, this has been an hour filled with so much information about Newgrange, Bruna Boyne, and Neolithic Island. It's been such a pleasure.
Great to see you again after

Speaker 15 featuring together for this newly released History Hit documentary on prehistoric Ireland. And it just goes to me to say, Marish, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 18 Thank you very much, Stristson. Have a joyous.

Speaker 15 Well, there you go. There was Dr.
Marish O'Sullivan talking all things New Grange, this wonder of Stone Age Ireland. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 15 If you'd like more information about New Grange or the landscape it's within, the Brune

Speaker 15 then do also check out our new documentary on History Hit presented by myself, also featuring Morris, called Prehistoric Island, Secrets of the Stone Age that focuses on Brune Bojne and great monuments like Newgrange.

Speaker 15 Thank you once again for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 15 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 15 Lastly, if you want more ancient history videos and clips, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at Ancientstriston.

Speaker 15 That's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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