This is a few days late in coming, but this post is the beginning of the promised Ireland recollections. I've already covered our first two days in Dublin, so I'm picking up on Days 3 and 4, in which we travelled through the town of Drogheda (DRAH-heh-duh--gotta love them Irish) to get to the ancient passage tomb of Newgrange.
You should know, fellow travelers, that Sean and I approached this trip with a very spontaneous mentality. In other words, our travel strategy consisted of hearing of someplace interesting and saying, "Oooh, let's go there!" Remarkably, this strategy actually worked really well for us, and we had no mishaps along the way. We had heard of these passage tombs that pre-dated Stonehenge and the pyramids, and were so intrigued by the idea that we couldn't pass up the chance to visit.
We took a train through some of the prettiest countryside in the world. They aren't kidding when they call Ireland the Emerald Isle: on those rare moments when the clouds peel back and the sun pours out, the grass practically glows in the light. Behind moss-covered stone walls, sheep and cows and horses graze languidly in pastoral quaintness. After stopping at the hostel, which was the prettiest one we'd stayed at so far, we walked the short distance to the visitors' center for the burial tombs.
No one knows what the builders of these tombs--Newgrange and Knowth--intended at the time of their construction. Their size belies the simplicity of the tunnel system in that, though one would expect a honeycombed network beneath the mound, there are really only one or two tunnels. And these tunnels actually only house the bones of a few members of the community. The main point of Newgrange, it seems, was not to be a tomb at all, but a sort of ceremonial monument. The entrance to Newgrange is painstakingly aligned so that the sunrise on the winter solstice casts a perfect column of light in the interior chamber, after the longest night of the year--a reminder that the long winter would end, that the sun would return, and that the seasons would repeat their cycle instead of descending further into the cold and dark. In a time when the world seemed harsher and less predictable (as if it has ever gotten more predictable), the people would gather around this little warm beam of light to receive the hope it offered.
The next day Sean and I rented bikes from the hostel and pedaled out to the site of the Battle of the Boyne, fought between the armies of James I and William of Orange. I was a grouch for a few kilometers because I hadn't ridden a bike in years and it was proving more of a challenge than I anticipated, but I brightened up after I got the hang of it. From thereon out it was only a matter of not getting hit by cars as we biked the six or seven kilometers to the battlefield. We walked through the exhibit at the manor house and then tramped through the fields, past fields of hay and low stone walls, sheep and horses, and the most gorgeous, rolling Irish landscape you can imagine.
What I liked about visiting these places was not just the picturesque quality of the landscape, which was so beautiful you couldn't take a bad picture of it if you tried. I liked to see the way the region's history lapsed into legend, then myth, then history again; it's like looking at the striations in a rock face. Because the tombs were built so long ago, their meaning began to wane in the memories of the descendents of the tomb-builders. During the Christian age, the people who lived on the Newgrange mound used the tomb as a refrigerator because it was consistently cooler than the air outside. People built settlements on top of the mound, and grass crept up the sides, until it resembled little more than an abnormal hillock. The original use of the mound had long faded in the memory of the people by this time. When the Vikings invaded and siezed Newgrange for its strategic placement as the highest hill around, the meaning was entirely forgotten. Sometime in the long gap between this complete erasure of the mound's identity and its rediscovery centuries later, whispers and rumors surrounded the strange geographical formations like mist. They were strange places--perhaps magic, the people thought. They became the fairy mounds, regarded with a suspicious eye by locals as entrances into the Otherworld--not far from their original meaning, as symbolic passages into the next life.
You have to wonder, don't you, what the Norse descendents felt as their children played on these hills with the air of mystery and superstition, threats so very real in their minds back then. What the people of later centuries suspected as they passed the tombs hidden beneath the grass, looming in a twilight that made one think that the fey people flitted just out of the corners of your eyes. What James and Williams' armies must have thought as they forded the Boyne just below Newgrange's hill, holding their guns over their heads and casting nervous glances at the legend-haunted hill that portended some unreadable omen for the battle ahead. It's interesting, isn't it? How one thing can mean so many things at so many different times--and, finally, come to signify all of them, even as it accumulates new ones?
I think it's fascinating.
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