Prehistoric Ireland: Newgrange

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Speaker 13 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 13 This stunning tomb lies at the heart of a special landscape known as Brune Boña, the poster monument in a valley of Stone Age marbles. Its name is Newgrange.

Speaker 13 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 13 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 13 It is a fascinating structure situated at the heart of an equally fascinating landscape of the utmost prehistoric importance.

Speaker 13 And it's also the subject of a brand new documentary presented by by myself that has just dropped on History Hit. It's called Prehistoric Ireland, Secrets of the Stone Age.

Speaker 13 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 13 Murray is an expert on the many Stone Age monuments of Ireland, including Newgrange.

Speaker 13 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 13 The story of Newgrange is one of stones and spirituality, of megaliths and mythology, of river travel and rock art.

Speaker 14 So let's get into it.

Speaker 13 Murray, it is great to have you on the podcast. It's good to see you again.

Speaker 14 Thank you very much, Tristan. It's very nice to be here as well.

Speaker 13 Now, not only, in my opinion, are you the unofficial winner of the smoothest Irish accents that I've ever heard, but you are also an expert on Newgrange.

Speaker 13 And surely this is one of the, if not the most famous prehistoric site in Ireland?

Speaker 14 Yeah, the most famous, I suspect, prehistoric site. It's obviously a World Heritage site, part of a World Heritage site, probably

Speaker 14 maybe the best known of the three because of the solstice, which we can speak about.

Speaker 14 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 14 The excavations there began around that time, but Nouth emerged in terms of archaeological information, slightly behind Newgrange in terms of information.

Speaker 13 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 13 I mean, Marish what exactly is Newgrange we can talk about nouth as well what exactly are these prehistoric monuments that we know the names of so well

Speaker 14 they are

Speaker 14 more or less circular mounds usually constituted of stone and soil and so on covering a megalithic tomb which is

Speaker 14 entered along a passage from the exterior into a chamber in the interior and this gives them the name passage tombs and the ones in the Boyne Valley including newgrange and nouth these are enormous um you know maybe 80 meters across some of them you know they're they're quite they're 90 meters in the case of nouth they're very very extensive and they contain an enormous amount of material apart from anything else and that area you mentioned the boin there so we'll get to the river boin in a moment but you mentioned first of all the word megalith now what do we mean by the word megalith i'm going back to my ancient greek and i think that's megas lithos that it's kind of great stone idea isn't it exactly large stones And these are enormous stones.

Speaker 14 In the case of Newgrange, which would have the largest stones actually in the Boyne Valley, some of the curbstones there are approximately four meters long and maybe a meter high by sometimes almost a meter wide as well.

Speaker 14 So an enormous mass of stone. And they seem to have been collected round about the area.
They don't seem to have been quarried.

Speaker 14 You know, they may have been outcrops that were quarried, but they weren't, you know, the entire stone is not a quarried stone. It may have been broken off an outcrop or something like that.

Speaker 14 They're massive stones, and this is what gives its name.

Speaker 14 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 14 And that in itself is an enormous amount of labor, as you can imagine.

Speaker 13 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 13 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 13 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 14 Well, the megalithic tradition was very much part of Western Europe, and it seems to have emerged around the same time that farming arrived.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 So it's quite an extensive area. And within that,

Speaker 14 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 14 But it's 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 13 It always seems like a Mace Howe and Newgrange, and probably

Speaker 13 Nouth as well. They always seem to share that trophy of being the greatest Stone Age tomb surviving, isn't it?

Speaker 13 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 14 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 14 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 3300 BC, 3200 BC.

Speaker 14 And the Orkney 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 14 I'm sorry about this, just at Nouth,

Speaker 14 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 14 And within the East Tomb at Nouth, there was a very spectacular macehead found, which was featured in the the Stonehenge exhibition in the British Museum a couple of years ago.

Speaker 14 And that mace head, everything about it would suggest that it may well come from Britain and maybe from Orkney. Most likely place in Britain that it would have come from is probably Orkney.

Speaker 13 Yes, we had a look at that macehead, I think, with creator Berners Gilhui in the National Museum of Ireland.

Speaker 13 It's such an extraordinary artefact, isn't it?

Speaker 13 And do feel free to bring in Nalth 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 13 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. If it was built

Speaker 13 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 13 It always feels like important to mention those two too, just to get the sense of just how old it is.

Speaker 14 People, as you say, typically throw out that piece of information or piece of data. The interesting thing about Newgrange,

Speaker 14 and indeed Stonehenge, maybe more such Stonehenge than Newgrange, is that these sites weren't built in a day, you know, they evolved, you know.

Speaker 14 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 14 Newgrange looks more like a job of work, so to speak, in the sense that, you know, there was a certain integration in the way it was built.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 Now, that is later than Newgrange, but the actual site itself and its use as a special place

Speaker 14 would be around the same time as Newgrange, possibly even earlier in some cases.

Speaker 14 So, I am 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 13 Well, okay, but that's fair enough.

Speaker 13 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 13 Let's talk a bit about the wider landscape of Newgrange. You've mentioned it is situated in the Boyne River Valley, but Marish, I've got in my notes, obviously, the name Bruna Boyne.

Speaker 13 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 14 Well, Newgrange is located in County Mead 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 14 And through it flows the River Boyne, which is not the longest river in Ireland, but for some reason seems seems to be the one that mythologically seems to have been the most significant over time.

Speaker 14 So, this most sacred river, kind of Ireland. It's a very sacred river.

Speaker 14 And lots of our legendary stories and mythology in Ireland reference the River Boyne.

Speaker 14 And indeed, the name Boyne itself, the Irish version of the River Boyne, the Gaelic version, it references a goddess in the, you know, in the pantheon, so to speak, of Irish mythology.

Speaker 14 And the sort of same name as the river itself, this goddess was the mother of Ingus and you mentioned Bru and the Boine.

Speaker 14 The Bru is actually the stronghold or the sort of palace or the homestead of the god Ingus. It's the fortress of the Boin, so to speak.

Speaker 14 And it's supposed to have been inhabited by the god Angus, a member of the Tuhadedonant, the pre-Celtic people in the understanding of those people, or the pre-Irish, really.

Speaker 14 Ingus was the son of Boina herself, of the River Boyne, and of the great Celtic god, the Dogdar, the Great Tua, the Donan god. So in mythology alone, it's actually a very significant place.

Speaker 14 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 14 they all show signs of a lot of activity in early medieval times with suterins underground passages being built into the mounds uh in the case of nowth houses were being built on the edge of the mound and indeed on part of the mound

Speaker 14 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 so on they were in and out of the tombs or writing graffiti in them But strangely enough, not at Newgrange.

Speaker 14 There's no evidence at Newgrange of this sort of intensive early medieval activity.

Speaker 14 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. So it may well have protected the site.

Speaker 14 So that's, so to speak, the and the reason I'm going on about this is that the Boyne, of course, seems to have been a key factor in the location of these tombs.

Speaker 14 because the other group of tombs is at Loch Crewe over in the western part of County Meath,

Speaker 14 and these overlook the valley of the Blackwater River, which actually is a tributary of the River Boyne.

Speaker 14 So the whole network seems to have been significant, the Boyne, but especially the River Boyne itself.

Speaker 14 Then the other aspect of this is that the River Boyne flows eastwards through County Meath

Speaker 14 from Slane towards Drahada, some miles to the 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 13 The bend in the Boyne or the Bend in the Boyne.

Speaker 14 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 14 So the landscapes played a key role.

Speaker 13 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 13 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 13 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 14 Absolutely.

Speaker 14 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 Nelthes, down out particularly, as you're actually travelling along.

Speaker 14 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 14 Of course, the other thing about the River Boyne 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 14 And eel, I think, might have played a role as well.

Speaker 14 It's a food resource as well for the River Boyne.

Speaker 13 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 13 Absolutely. More than 100, like were originally monuments on this area.
The people themselves, Marish, who built Newgrange, do we have any idea who these people were?

Speaker 14 Well, in some ways, we know them a lot through the tombs. In other ways, they are mysterious people.

Speaker 14 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 14 So they are mysterious.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 But there's really no evidence of this settlement. We don't see anything like a village or

Speaker 14 you know, it's hard to know. So some people have explained this by saying that perhaps it was nomadic.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 we assume there 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 14 The ones in County Sligo and the west, like Carrow Moor and Carrow Keel, they were built a couple of centuries earlier, or they certainly started a few centuries earlier.

Speaker 14 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 14 The interesting thing is that one of the ways that we know a little bit about them is through DNA research. One particular

Speaker 14 skull fragment from Newgrange

Speaker 14 has allowed geneticists to build a sort of a profile of the individual, a genetic profile of the individual.

Speaker 14 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 14 There's a bit of mobility there, exactly.

Speaker 14 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 14 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.
You know, it's difficult.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 They seem to have had the ability to choose where they wanted to place these monuments, which again suggests power of some sort.

Speaker 13 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 to Irish mythology too.

Speaker 13 But does it then seem to be that early on in the story of Bruneuboyne 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 for the dead, as a cemetery.

Speaker 13 I know as time goes on, it gets more complicated than that.

Speaker 13 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 14 I think you're right. They certainly are making a statement in the landscape.
That's the first thing.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 knocknery in county sligo

Speaker 14 and where these tombs have been excavated there is evidence of pre-tomb activity at the sites okay 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 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 14 countryside being opened up and

Speaker 14 these traditional sacred places, the nature of them and the sort of landscape context of them, if we want to put it that way, being changed by farming and sacred places almost coming under threat.

Speaker 14 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 passage tombs to be seen from far away and they interlink across the country from mountaintop to mountaintop in some cases.

Speaker 14 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, the mound or the cairn on top of the mountain stands out so strongly, you know, and very startly.

Speaker 14 And these were obviously designed to be seen, and they obviously sent a statement.

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Speaker 13 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 13 First off, Murray, 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 13 Because I remember going to Auckley 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 14 Michael J.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 But then as against that, they didn't have the facilities we would have today. They didn't have wheat vehicles, for example, never mind anything mechanical.

Speaker 14 They didn't have horses at the time in Ireland. So they were moving the stuff without a lot of the modern facilities.

Speaker 14 And some of these stones they moved were absolutely extraordinarily large stones, which in some cases were brought from quite far away. And

Speaker 14 I always sometimes think it's so funny like that, having brought these stones from wherever, you know, they arrived down there.

Speaker 14 Maybe if they came along the bine, whatever way they came along, they said, Well, while we're at it, let's bring them up to the top of the hill, you know. Yes, that's the thing.

Speaker 13 Because you can ferry them along the river, but then you've got to get to the top of that massive ridge.

Speaker 14 Absolutely,

Speaker 14 yeah. And I indeed, I often think, and I'm straying into something slightly different, so bear with me for a second.

Speaker 14 That 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 14 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 14 And there is evidence that they were locating stones in specific places, you know, very deliberately looking for particular types of stone.

Speaker 14 In the case of the Moin Valley, they would travel quite a distance to find the stone they wanted.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 material, it often carries this kind of significance, like people bringing water back from Lourdes or something like that.

Speaker 14 You know, that it's a material often carries significance for people or they carry stones we discussed this actually another time that um in my own case we're from county kerry in the west the southwest of ireland living in county wicklow

Speaker 14 but it's very significant to bring a stone from west kerry to county wicklow 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 People would do things like place that on the tombs of parents and grandparents and so forth.

Speaker 14 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 13 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-Bogne, and let's say with the building of Newgrange.

Speaker 13 You probably know what I'm going to ask Murrish, which is the Cloverhead Cliffs.

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 13 Now, Marish, what are these cliffs and how do they relate to Newgrange and the building of Newgrange?

Speaker 14 Clower Head is just north of Dundalk Bay. It's on the northern side there

Speaker 14 on the Cardigford Peninsula.

Speaker 14 Basically, many of the stones used at Newgrange, the evidence seems to suggest that these are 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 14 I mentioned earlier there were a very large number of stones used in the Boyne Valley between all of the tombs there.

Speaker 14 But it would appear that Newgrange got the pick of the stones 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 13 The curb says, yeah, to define there. So, like, think of like a curb.
They surround the perimeter of Newgrange, don't they?

Speaker 14 Yeah, this circle of, they're at the base of the cairn, so to speak.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 Yeah, they had to know in advance the direction in which the passage was facing.

Speaker 14 Because in the case of Newgrange, they were facing the passage towards the spot on the horizon where the sun would rise at midwinter.

Speaker 13 Ah, the winter solstice link. Okay,

Speaker 14 and this was their first, so to speak, that line was important to them.

Speaker 14 And then the actual enclosing of this circular space or this more or less circular space was also, for some reason, important.

Speaker 14 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.
Right.

Speaker 13 So that makes sense. 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.

Speaker 13 It's almost kind of like Stone Age surveyors kind of thing, isn't it?

Speaker 13 You're planning it all out. And then they go and get the stones from places like Clothahead.
And do we know much about that process?

Speaker 13 Because to me, I love logistics stuff, whether it's military or building or whatever from ancient history.

Speaker 13 Do we know, get any sense of that whole logistical process of the ferrying of those great stones from places like the Clothahead Cliffs and then back to Newgrange?

Speaker 14 It's assumed that the river was used

Speaker 14 a way of moving them and maybe the sea as well. But this is a precarious business with very large stones.
And the other thing that I remember some years ago, some colleagues,

Speaker 14 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 13 Must have been some shipwreck

Speaker 14 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 14 This is all the

Speaker 14 campaigns.

Speaker 14 There seems to have been nothing lost along the way. So

Speaker 14 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 14 We don't really know, but we know that they got the stone from A to B.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 But it was massive. And this had to be done with, in the case of the Boyne Valley, I can't hundreds and hundreds of large stones, each travelling individually.

Speaker 13 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? Hammerstones again and again and again?

Speaker 14 Hammer stones, and presumably using fire and water maybe to break them as well.

Speaker 14 But then, yes, you 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, you know.

Speaker 14 So they seem to have known what they were at.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 maybe five millimeters across, or at most, maybe seven or eight millimeters across, 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 14 And I think that's an extraordinary sort of 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 14 I think if you place that then onto a larger scale with the megalithic tombs, they knew how to handle stone.

Speaker 14 But what's maybe spectacular and maybe remarkable about all of this is that going back to 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 14 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 14 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 13 Let's get back towards the monument. Let's say they have been able to bring some of these curbstones back.

Speaker 13 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 13 Could we imagine the equivalent of Stone Age scaffolding or ramps or stuff like that being used to try and help them?

Speaker 14 I think so. And they certainly would have used, I think, these types of things because they couldn't otherwise have done it, I think.
You know,

Speaker 14 certainly they were using ramps, I suspect.

Speaker 14 The other thing is that in other places in Brittany and so forth, where they were dealing with large stones, I'm thinking of the tablet of Marshan there, where

Speaker 14 there was a sort of alignment there beside it, that you were able to see evidence of them dealing with the stone, so to speak.

Speaker 14 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 14 I've seen various attempts to explain how they might have done it. You know, as you say, scaffolding, ramps.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 and you needed to predict what would happen at that stage i think and i think that's the genius of these people that in the case of the corballed roof at newgrange as you know it's a corballing yes it's this high corbaled roof um ending with a flat stone across the top the way this corballing was done is that uh first of all the stones lean slightly outwards and downwards so there's a slight angle in them and the weight of each of these stones was behind, so to speak.

Speaker 14 So when you're inside a new range, you see what looked like boulders, maybe, you know, less than a meter across and maybe 20, 30 meters or centimeters, something like that, deep or whatever.

Speaker 14 But in fact,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And then at the very top, this flat stone is put across, which I suppose emphasized the fact that this is not an arch, but a corbal system, which is slightly different building technology.

Speaker 14 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 13 It's absolutely fascinating that. And the corbeling technique is absolutely remarkable.

Speaker 14 They use a sort of,

Speaker 14 I can't quite remember the materials they used, but it was some, you know, a mixture of various things to actually

Speaker 14 seal the spaces.

Speaker 14 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 13 So maybe for some 5,000 years or so before O'Kelly and his excavations early in the century, maybe

Speaker 13 you rarely, if ever, had water seeping into that central chamber. That's quite a fact of itself.

Speaker 14 Exactly. Yes, yeah.
Yeah. Oh, wow.

Speaker 13 Okay, that's extraordinary.

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Speaker 13 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 13 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 14 Absolutely.

Speaker 14 And I mean the three recesses, again, not to 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 14 Obviously, it creates a cruciform effect.

Speaker 14 But generally in these pastor tombs, the right-hand recess is given preeminence in terms of size, ornamentation, elaboration, and sometimes the contents of that side.

Speaker 14 And it's an interesting dimension of passage tombs, this emphasis in Ireland on the right-hand side,

Speaker 14 the preeminence of the right-hand side, because this across cultural phenomena is found in many cultures, including modern Christian culture, you know, or in Europe.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 13 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 and that time period.

Speaker 13 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 13 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 14 It's a very distinctive type that's found in Ireland.

Speaker 14 made up almost universally of abstract motifs, geometric, schematic type of designs, circles, spirals, zigzags, lozenges, you know, cup marks, of course, according to these

Speaker 14 universal, so to speak, cup marks. But yeah, it's that type of thing.
Now,

Speaker 14 it's part of a much wider European rock art tradition, you know, that particularly in the Iberian Peninsula, you get a type of stone 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 pastumbes in Ireland.

Speaker 14 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 14 than it is to other pastum traditions in Europe.

Speaker 13 And Marish is this so-called Atlantic rock art.

Speaker 14 Atlantic rock art, very much so. Yeah, it's

Speaker 14 when you think of Atlantic rock art,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It's quite common, Kilmartin Glen, yeah, yeah, yeah, Kilmartin Glen, exactly. Now, that's a more restricted form of art than what's found in the pastums.

Speaker 14 The pastums designs are slightly different, they're actually more sophisticated, you know, in terms of aesthetics and so forth.

Speaker 14 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 14 And they seem in some cases to almost move away from the geometric designs into

Speaker 14 the case of Nouth, particularly in the Boyne 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 14 And they sort of lose touch with the geometric sort of origins of the artwork, which is very interesting.

Speaker 13 It is.

Speaker 13 And almost as a teaser, you and i in our upcoming documentary on prehistoric ireland part of that we explore that rock art outside nouth 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 new grange as well 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 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 13 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 14 Absolutely, yes. And of course, it's repeated then in the case of Newgrange inside in the end chamber as well on one of the stones there.
There's a very famous example of it there as well.

Speaker 14 It's an extraordinary feature of the megalithic art in the Boyne Valley that the richest concentration is to be found at Nouth.

Speaker 14 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 14 But probably the finest example of megalithic art in the Boyne Valley is that Newgrange entrance stone.

Speaker 14 And very much not far behind it is Curbstone 52 at the back of Newgrange.

Speaker 14 And then there is curbstone 67 at Newgrange. These are the three big decorated curbstones.
There are other decorated curbstones in Newgrange, but these three stand apart.

Speaker 14 And what's interesting about them is that if you were to take away those three from Newgrange, 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 14 But these ones lift newgrange and actually there's certainly curbstone one the entrance stone and the one directly across from it curbstone 52 and remember that these are the ones that are on the axis of the rising sun and you know if you drew a line through the site and through the passage and these are probably the two finest most the finest pieces of megalithic art in the buying valley There's one part of the construction of Newgrange that I'm sure many people listening to this who have visited Newgrange will be maybe shouting into their podcast, into their audio app, say, what about this?

Speaker 13 What about this part? And so I must ask about this part as well, briefly.

Speaker 13 And it is interesting, which is that massive courts wall, Murrish, around the outside, that kind of white wall of Newgrange that is one of the most

Speaker 13 eye-catching parts of photos and images of Newgrange today. How accurate do we think that is? Do we think that was part of the original build?

Speaker 14 Well, I think to start, if Newgrange had been excavated in 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 And he certainly found all of that quartz on the ground, more or less, in front of the curb at Newgridge.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Now, it's very controversial, and people have queried and questioned it, and so on.

Speaker 14 The interesting thing is that, as you mentioned there, that quartz wall has become so much part of New Grange 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 14 It was a way of restoring a monument at the time.

Speaker 14 And in Ferris, all of this quartz was found there, and indeed those rounded stones stones that are found amongst the quartz, they were all found on site on the ground in front of the kerbstone.

Speaker 14 The one thing that might be of interest is that O'Kelly did point out that he did find stones on tops of the curbstones. In an excavation I conducted myself at Nokrowan County, Kilkenny.

Speaker 14 There was one particular curbstone that had split, you know, and the front half of it had fallen forward,

Speaker 14 rather like a kebab, you know, sort of.

Speaker 14 And the filling of the space between the front half of that carbson 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 14 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 14 I think that's the most controversial aspect of the new range reconstruction: is that the wall is so high. It's it's not quite vertical, but it's very close to being vertical.

Speaker 14 The suggestion would be that if there were some quartz on top of the curbstones, it may not have been as sheer as that, so to speak.

Speaker 13 I'm glad that we mentioned it because

Speaker 13 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 13 This feels slightly unfair because I feel the legacy of Newgrange is deserving of a full podcast episode in its own right, Marish.

Speaker 13 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 Bonds, the Brune-Boyne comes this sacred landscape full of timber circles and henges and people venturing there from far and wide.

Speaker 13 I mean, Marish, give us an insight into that legacy of Newgrange and what follows. I mean, I've got even in my notes here, some Roman coins were found there too.
It's quite extraordinary.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 14 And an aspect of the Boyne Valley that maybe was understated in the past, but has become clearer in more recent times is 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 14 They were built perhaps somewhere, you know, maybe some hundreds of years after the megalithic tombs.

Speaker 14 But they do 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 14 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 14 And there seems to have been some sort of a lull through the Bronze Age in some ways, you know.

Speaker 14 But then in the early centuries AD, for some reason, there's material from Roman Roman Britain is placed in front of the tomb at Newgrange in the form of coins, gold coins from about the third or fourth century.

Speaker 14 I think they're

Speaker 14 third and fourth century, maybe.

Speaker 14 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 14 So, and this is material that seems to have come from provincial, you know, the edge of the Roman Empire, Britain, presumed to be Britain.

Speaker 14 And they are placed at those standing stones in front of the entrance to Newgrange, it would appear.

Speaker 14 So, this seems to indicate some sort of a significance for the site, and it's part of an upsurge of activity that took place at these megalithic tombs during the later Iron Age.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 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

Speaker 14 in terms of its contents and so on. And there as well,

Speaker 14 beside it, at the Wrath of the Synods, which is the site excavated by the British Israelites, but that's a slight distraction. There were found actually some glass, Roman glass, and other

Speaker 14 ceramics, you know, that were have been identified as being largely drinking ware and

Speaker 14 as if banqueting was taking place or something like that at these sites.

Speaker 14 So, between burial, banqueting, the laying of, you know, sort of votive offerings or something like that, they seem to have attracted people in the Iron Age.

Speaker 14 Now, what the motivation for that was is very difficult to know

Speaker 13 it's still interesting and actually it leads me into a fun little statement to almost before we completely wrap this up there is sometimes that 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 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 um statement to kind of testament to that legacy part of it as well.

Speaker 13 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.
But I will ask you, personally,

Speaker 13 what excites you the most about Newgrange? 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 anchor pins were keeping cloaks closed or whatever, you know.

Speaker 14 Experiments have shown that if these had been on the bodies when they were cremated, they would have disappeared. They would not have survived the burning.

Speaker 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 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 14 So there's a lot to be discovered.

Speaker 14 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 14 Ruth Cardin. And she has found that this bead is generally made from bird bone, very elaborately carved at the terminals, both inside and out.

Speaker 14 but also that some of them are made from deer antler and that to make a tubular bead of deer antler was very elaborate process involving cutting off a little rectangle of the zan

Speaker 14 from the outer part somehow or other softening curving it around into a cylinder and using it and then we find these because you can identify them very easily with the sort of uh 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 uh that's done in them and we're we're just really finding out about these people well you know this is great in its own right because it means we can do follow-up episodes on prehistoric Island and Nokaro, like a place where you've done your excavations as well in the future too, Marish.

Speaker 13 And of course, Nouth and Douth, two other great tombs that we mentioned in passing, but obviously the focus was on Newgrange.

Speaker 13 Marish, this has been an hour filled with so much information about Newgrange, Brunei Boynia, and Neolithic Island. It's been such a pleasure.
Great to see you again after.

Speaker 13 Featuring together for this newly released history hit documentary on Prehistoric Island.

Speaker 13 And it just goes to me to say murish thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you very much trists and have a joyous

Speaker 13 well there you go there was dr murrish o'sullivan talking all things new grange this wonder of stone age ireland thank you for listening if you'd like more information about new grange or the landscape it's within the brune boigne 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 Bruna Boigna and great monuments like Newgrange.

Speaker 13 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 favour.

Speaker 13 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Speaker 13 Lastly, if you want more ancient history videos and clips, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at ancientstriston. That's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.

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