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Published: March 30th 2008
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Newgrange Passage Tomb
The awesome and very moving Newgrange Passage Tomb, at Bru Na Boinne, in the Boyne Valley, about and hour outside of Dublin Ireland - Dublin & Bru Na Boinne
Wednesday 26th - Friday 27th March
Up early today...the bus left Doolin for Dublin at 8am. We are looking forward to seeing Dublin properly, as we only had a quick look when we flew in from London and went straight down to Kilkenny. Its a 5 hour trip, with stops in a few places along the way - there are so many picturesque towns and villages on The Burren, all full of charm and character.... its the kind of place you could just stay for weeks and spend your time exploring.
Anyway the trip was good, Reagan and I slept for a lot of it and we rolled into Dublin just after 2pm. Its big! We grabbed a cab from the bus station over to Avalon House, which is a hostel right in the centre of Dublin, near the Temple Bar area. It was great. Huge kitchen and a cafe/lounge area with a fireplace, free wifi, foosball, pool and very near everything. Only bitch I had was that the lift was working, and we had to continually traipse up and down 4 flights to our room, oh and the showers were
Woodhenge at Knowth Passage Tomb
At the 5000 year old passage tombs, Bru Na Boinne not hot. But if you want somewhere great to stay in Dublin, this is perfect. Very good security too, with 3 point card access.
Explored the city, especially the Temple Bar district - pubs, cafes and little cobblestoned laneways everywhere. Markets on certain days. The district is known as the cultural area of Dublin, and is full of old buildings. I will definitely have to come back here one day and do the pub thing....obviously cant this time around! We also walked around Trinity College which is huge and old.
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Day 2, and we are off to one of the highlights of the Ireland trip for me - I’ve been bursting to go and see the passage tombs at Bru Na Boinne, which have been classed as a World Heritage Site. They are ancient (over 5000 years old - older than the pyramids in Egypt) and were built with an amazing amount of huge kerb stones, presumably to house the ashes of thier dead.
There are three main tombs you can visit in Bru Na Boyne, which is about an hours drive from Dublin, in County Meath. Knowth & Dowth which you can walk around, and on top of Knowth. And Newgrange, which was my favorite, which you can actually go inside. The tombs are several kilomnetres apart from each other, and are accessible only by guided tours. They are surrounded by the scenic , green Boyne Valley as well as the river on almost every side.
Newgrange itself is huge, just over an acre around. When you enter the tomb however, it is tiny inside, you can squeeze only about 20 people in. You must go by guided tour, and the guides are excellent. The feeling once you are inside the tomb is quite overwhelming. There we were, standing in a place built by hand, over 5000 years ago. The inside of the tomb (we were not allowed to take photos) is about trhe size of a small bedroom and you look up and see layer upon layer of beautiful huge green and grey stone, all seemingly precariously wedged in between each other. There are three tiny chambers running off the main one, and this is where the ashes of the dead were placed. The rocks are carved and it has such a presence about it.
But the most amazing thing of all, was when they showed us how Newgrange has been aligned to the Winter Solstice, which usally happends around 20th-24th December every year. The are two entrances to the chamber inside, one below the other and they do not meet. When you go inside the tomb, you enter by the bottom entrance, but the ground rises up almost impercepotably as you go down the passage to the chamber, until by the time you reach the centre, your feet are actually at the same height as the second higher opening. And these people, so long ago, had known so much about the sun, astrology and engineering, and they had built the tomb with such precision, that on Winter Solstice, the sun enters the higher passage and lights up the internal chamber within. Because this only lasts for a moment, on one day a year, the caretakers have recreated the effect using electricity so that you can truly understand what happens.
Once the group is inside the tomb they turn out the lighting and the chamber is plunged into pitch blackness. Then, slowly, you can see the sun begin to shine up the passage, until the end chamber is illuminated. It is totally awe inspiring and so moving. I felt like I was Indianna Jones in the Temple of Doom or something, it was so beautiful. Apparently there are a lot of people who have had a similar feeling because every year, the caretakers of the tombs do a ballot process to frecive visitors during the week of the Winter Solstice, and they receive over 20,000 applications every single year. The people who are invited to come to Newgrange over the anticipated Winter Solstice period have to take their chances that they will be the ones who are standing in the tomb when it happens. It would be worth the visit to see, although a long way to come for no guarantees.
Im so glad we visited here.
We met some other travellers on the bus on the way back - one American living in Rome, one from Oregon living in Galway, and a girl from Finland. She told us to make sure we went to Lapland because it if so gorgeous. Hmm wish we could, but unfortunately time and money won’t allow. Next trip mabey....
On our return we stopped into Trinity College again and decided to go and see the Book of Kells in the library. You get to see two pages from the book as you walk through the display, but it was not quite the amazing experience that I had heard it was. However when we went upstairs to the Long Room, we were gobsmacked at the library which looked as though it had been taken straight out of Harry Potter. It has huge big bookshelves from floor to ceiling, with laddrs to reach the top ones. The book were all ancient and leather bound, with old yellowed pages and busts of famous people lining the shelves. The restorers (who you can see working) have manged to restore so many old books to a wonderful condition, and these are displayed along the centre of the room. The Long Room contained another two pages form the Book of Kells, and these were a lot more interesting when you look at the amount of detail that went into the decoration of the pages, and the almost freakishly perfect neatness of the script.
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Day 3 in Dublin we mucked around in the city for a while (more on that later) then headed out to the airport at 3:00om for our flight to Madrid. We were both more tired than we thought as we both fell asleep on the way out and the taxi driver had to wake us up lol.
Bye for now Ireland, we will miss you! More when we reach Madrid....
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