The Boynne Valley, July '06

Drogheda
I caught the train from Belfast, having sworn off buses for the remainder of my time in Ireland. One day they’ll invent inner ear transplants and I’ll never have to feel vomitorious in a car/bus/plane/boat/kayak again. Thank god for train travel in the meantime.

Drogheda was a great town. I found the Green Door hostel really easily and it was very comfortable, as hostels go. The town was fairly typical of eastern Irish towns. Pretty buildings in a mixture of stone, slate and thatch. Some nice cathedrals and some older buildings crumbling at the edges. There was also the ever present evidence of expansion. Cranes, ubermodern buildings, construction sites. The river flowing through the centre of town made is picturesque all the same, especially when viewed from the hill.

Right in the middle of one side of the river was a fantastic Iron Age hill, manmade, called the Mound of Amergin (he was a character in Irish myth, one of the sons of either the conquering race from the south (probably Spanish in origin) or a royal son of the Firbolg race, depending on which legend you’re reading. Definitely a very famous name. The mound is topped by a far more recent addition. Cromwell’s forces built a small fort on the top of the hill to bombard the native resistance forces with canon. It gave them a very unfair advantage. There is a small museum near the mound with some fairly ordinary exhibits. There was a very good geological display though, showing all the different types of stone found in Ireland and their uses.

The Boynne River Valley was by far the most beautiful part of Ireland that I’d seen so far. It was rolling and green and quite beautiful, despite being very, very settled. It was also the area that held the most interest for me, in an archaeological and mythological sense, which is the main reason I’d saved it until toward the end of my visit. There were several sites I wanted to visit; Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, Monasterboice, Mellifont Abbey, the hill of Slane, the Hill of Tara with the Lia Fail (the stone of destiny) and the site of the Battle of the Boynne which is also a very important Druidic historical site.

I saw all these things over just a few days as they’re all in a very small area. The first place I visited was Knowth, a collection of Neolithic passage tombs that completely blew me away. There was one very large mound surrounded by lots of smaller mounds. You couldn’t go inside the tombs but you could look down the tunnel and see how well preserved they are for their age. They’d also excavated the carved boundary stones - huge stones with geometric designs chipped into the rock and surrounding the entire central mound. In the same area was Dowth, less excavated and so less to see but just as important, historically speaking. Not too far away was the most famous of the three Neolithic sites, Newgrange. I’d wanted to visit Newgrange since I was about 10 years old. It was just as spectacular as I could have hoped. It’s the most well restored passage tomb in the area, and the biggest. It was originally constructed around 5000 years ago, at about the same time as Knowth and Dowth. That makes it 1000 years older than Stonehenge and 500 years older than the pyramids of Egypt. It is the oldest remaining example of human construction still intact. And it is mind-blowing. It is estimated that it was used for religious purposes for only a few decades before it was sealed, to be rediscovered almost 5000 years later in the 18th century C.E. Successive civilizations used the massive mound to build villages on, graze animals and grow crops. In the 18th century it was accidentally discovered by workers of a local landlord looking for coal. I was slowly restored and reconstructed until it is as it was when it was built. When reconstructing the façade they built it up and knocked it down again until the rocks fell in the same places as they were excavated at, showing that the design is as close to the original as it is possible to get. The white stone of the façade is Wicklow stone, transported for miles by river. The large lintel stones were also transported, from the north, probably using logs to roll them across the landscape. No reconstruction work was done on the interior of the tomb. They didn’t have to; it is as perfectly dry and stable as it was 5000 years ago. Not a drop of water has seeped through in all that time. Quite a feat for a dry stone construction.

You can go inside Newgrange as part of a controlled tour. They only allow a small number in at once because it isn’t very spacious. Being inside the tomb was thrilling. There was a real feeling of discovery and history, despite being one of a group and one of millions who’ve been inside in the last 200 years. When you walk into the tomb you rise gradually until you are standing 2m higher when you reach the centre of the chamber than you were at the entrance. It’s very subtle; you don’t notice the incline at all. In the central chamber there are three alcoves; one of them contains a huge carved stone bowl. This bowl is too large to fit out the passage which means that the entire tomb was constructed around this bowl. When it was originally excavated they found shards of broken human bone in the bowl. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Newgrange is its absolutely perfect placement, astronomically. It is situated so that on Winter solstice the dawn light travels down the entry passage and across the central chamber to rest in the stone bowl in the middle alcove. To imagine such exactness from the architect 5000 years ago is amazing. Not only to line it up right, like the stone henges, but to construct it so perfectly that the furthest reach of the sunlight on the solstice morning reaches along the corridor to the centre of the bowl and no further. It really did blow my mind.

Monasterboice was a big graveyard most famous for the two huge carved Celtic crosses it contains. One of them depicted the stories of heaven and hell and had been chipped away all around the bottom. This damage was done not by the English, as was most of the damage to historical monuments in Ireland, but by people emigrating to the Americas who wanted to take a little bit of home with them. Mellifont Abbey was next on the list although there was very little left to see. Really just one room and a fragment of the central temple. The interesting thing about it was that it was built along Islamic lines with a circular chapel rather than the rectangular layout typical of Christian abbeys. There were tombstone slabs covering the graves of the abbots and higher clergy but the common monks would have been buried in unmarked graves in the grounds. The Hill of Slane gave a great view of the surrounding area and the ruins were very picturesque. But again, they weren’t in very good repair. I think the lack of care taken of all the old monuments in Ireland reflects how difficult life has been for the people. It must have been far more important to stay alive than to restore and keep up relics from the past during the centuries of persecution by the English and the subsequent famines. It is lucky that there is some left at all.

While I was exploring all these places I picked up a young French boy called Adrienne. He was about 17 and still all tall and gangly and very sweet. I think he’ll be a total knockout in 5 or 6 years. As it was, it felt a bit like I’d picked up a stray puppy. But he was very amiable and I think he just wanted to practice his English on me. I was pleased at how much French I can still understand, especially when it’s mixed in with English words. We had a nice day at the tombs and wandering about the countryside. In the evening we shared a frozen pizza which I burned to a crisp. It was really quite inedible but poor Adrienne did his best. I think he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. We were both in stitches by the end of the meal.

I spent a whole day to see the Hill of Tara. This is a very special place. It is where they crowned all the High Kings (Ard Righ) of Ireland, right up until the ninth century. There wasn’t much left at Tara to show where the halls used to be, just some grass covered mounds, but in the centre of the hill was the Lia Fail, the stone of destiny. It is unfortunately very phallic looking, but perhaps that is the point, as it is supposed to have conferred the right to rule on the High Kings of all Ireland by screaming, singing, or tolling like a bell, depending on which story you’re listening to. It’s also known as The Singing Stone. It was very exciting to see something that I’d read about for so many years.

I had another interesting encounter with someone in Drogheda. His name was Robert. He was English, riding his bike to Belfast and had just finished a law degree at Oxford. He was also, hands down, the funniest person I’ve ever come across, and I don’t say that lightly. The weird thing was that it wasn’t even what he said that had me in stitches. It was just himself. And I seemed to have the same effect on him. He was only there over night, we had the dorm to ourselves and the entire time we were awake and in each other’s company we were laughing our arses off. Great, great fun. I wish I’d thought to get his email or something. That kind of hilarity doesn’t come around every day. But it makes a damned good memory.

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