OLDER THAN THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT AND STONEHENGE! Ireland's ancient site must be seen to be believed.

3200 years Before Christ. How on earth did they build it? What was it for?
This video covers one of the world’s most important archaeological sites. It’s arguably as important as the Pyramids of Egypt, certainly more ancient. We are of course visiting Newgrange in County Meath today, a prehistoric monument on the banks of the River Boyne.

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What we’re about to see dates from 3200 years before Christ. so that’s older that the Pyramids of Egypt and Stone Henge! Newgrange is what we call a passage tomb, but in fact it is one of three passage tombs in the Brú na Bóinne complex.

The building itself is pretty amazing – a kind of brutalist concrete architecture with a grass roof. But it’s well bedded into its gorgeous surroundings and I think is a lovely starting point for our adventure today.

A main feature of your Newgrange tour will be this visitors centre. You have to get the provided shuttle bus out to the prehistoric site itself, so while you wait for the bus, or indeed after you’re visited Newgrange if you’d prefer, you can walk around the exhibition. And the exhibition is really good. And my advice is that you go around it before your visit to the monument because it’ll give you all the background information you need to really understand Newgrange, its history and its importance.

I should say that it’s prohibited to film inside the actual tomb, but I was able to film the whole of the outside as you’ll see, and there’s a great lifesize reproduction of the actual passage tomb in this exhibition, so that will let you see what the inside of the monument looks like.

But the multimedia aspect of the visit is really good, and anyone who regularly watches Naked Ireland videos will know that I’m not always keen on these sorts of things, preferring the ancient monuments to speak for themselves. But this one works

The other two passage tombs here by the way are called Dowth and Knowth and there’s a load of other prehistoric structures in the vicinity of the monuments too, henges, burial mounds and standing stones. This area must once have been an important place for our ancestors.

So getting into the tomb you do have to bend, and the passage is kinda thin in places so that you brush against the stone on the way in. You need to watch your head in a few places. And then the tomb opens out into a cruciform shape when you get to the back of the passage. It’s actually incredible, the stone age engineering and science that underpins this 5200 year old monument!

The large stones at the entrance have prehistoric carvings, but there are other massive stones encircling the bottom of the entire mound. You have to wonder how stone age man was able to get these massive stones to the site and into position. This was even before the invention of the wheel and there were apparently no horses in Ireland in this period.

And the beautiful white quartz cobblestone came from the Wicklow Mountains, which is 90km south of here. And those granite boulders interspersed amongst the quartz came from the Mourne Mountains 95kms to the north. So the stone is not only heavy, but sourced from what would have been in the stone age an unfathomable distance – and not even in the same place. It came from equally far north and south of here. In total there about 200,000 tones of material. Towards the back of the monument we can see that the whole structure is covered in a mound of earth.

Bones were found in the burial chamber some of which were burnt, indicating that cremation would have taken place. DNA testing has shown that some of the bones belonged to a man who’s parents were possibly brother and sister, and this kind of in-breading is similar to the practice of Egyptian pharaohs, to keep the blood line pure and would indicate a that this was a royal dynasty. So all evidence – the prestige of the burial site and the king-like breading, points to an elite or royal tomb.

What was this place made for? It was obviously a very important place when you consider how long it must have taken to construct. Opinions on that differ between 5 years and 30 years

So the suggested purpose of this place is that it possibly had religious significance, a place to worship the dead for an astronomically based faith (based on the presence of the light chamber and the significance of the winter Solstice sunrise).