December 19, 1999

Lure of a Pre-Celtic Grave

By DENISE FAINBERG

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In three visits to Newgrange over the years, the author has pursued the silent mystery of the neolithic Irish who built it

hat I remember from my first visit to Newgrange -- the now-famous passage grave in County Meath -- is the rippling grainfields facing the tomb, green and shifting, like the sea. The great mound itself had dominated the Boyne River valley for thousands of years, dark and virtually unchanged. It was 1965 and I was 14, on a family trip to Ireland.

You could drive right up to the site then, on a little road that stopped at a makeshift building serving the archaeologists, whose systematic excavations had begun in 1962. There were no other tourists about. A young man, a student maybe, offered to show us around. There was the great entrance stone, all spirals and wavy lines; the ring of curbstones set into the green mound like a circlet on a head; and the burial chambers.

The young man led us down the narrow, not quite straight, passage to the triple chamber, where (he explained) the cremated remains of individuals had been placed. He told us about the impressively corbeled ceiling that kept the damp out, and showed us more carvings on the huge inner slabs. It was wonderful. Who? Why? When, they could tell us -- about 3300 B.C., by carbon checked with pollen dating. (That was the first I had heard of pollen dating. I marveled.) What did it mean? The spirals, lozenges and so on betokened a mind so different as to be almost alien. Though maybe not as alien as all that; some of the same geometric forms turn up on Aran sweaters.

My sister and I were so impressed that we returned in 1971. We were hitchhiking around Ireland and, as I remember, had to walk a few miles from the nearest village to get to Newgrange. A partly constructed, gleaming white facade glinted surprisingly in the ephemeral Irish sun.

Prof. Michael O'Kelly, who led the archaeological team from 1962 to 1975, had found quartz rubble under the grass and decided that the tomb had originally been faced in white quartz. This would have made a more imposing monument than a simple mound, however large, and would have been visible for quite a distance. He set about recreating this effect (in fact, it gave rather the impression of a spaceship at rest). Now the entrance was no longer a plain hole in the hill but a gaping black doorway contrasting with the white facing. We entered the tomb again. We also managed to visit Knowth and Dowth, two nearby passage tombs that had been excavated not long before. They were not as elaborate as Newgrange, but were clearly offshoots of the same pre-Celtic culture.

Years went by. I visited Newgrange for the third time, in June 1998. For years now access has been only by guided tour. The site was declared a national monument in 1985; a fair amount of land seems to have been acquired, either prior or as a result. In June 1997 a visitor center was opened, providing controlled entry to the site and the starting point for tours. Entrance costs $3.25, unless you also want to visit Knowth, in which case you pay $8. Dowth is closed, deemed unsafe.

I took a public bus to the parking lot and walked a couple of hundred yards to the visitor center, from which scheduled shuttle buses run the mile or so to the Newgrange tomb. Unaware that the shuttles were assigned, I browsed peaceably around the exhibits. A diorama shows the area -- Bru na Boinne -- as it probably looked when Newgrange was under construction. It's a fascinating and healthily circumspect interpretive center. There was a marked reluctance to jump to conclusions about the meaning of the carvings, the purposes of the various tomb features, or what rituals may have been performed there -- a contrast to the spate of speculations prevalent in the 60's and 70's, and even now in the New Age press, regarding such monuments. Tools and artifacts, and some reconstructed clothing, showed, not surprisingly, that the neolithic Irish lived much as American Indians did before Europeans came; except that the Irish had domestic cattle and sheep. When I showed up half an hour late for my assigned shuttle, the driver and dispatcher were thrown quite off kilter, which surprised me; I hadn't noticed that things in Ireland ran particularly on time. But all was set right with a call to the front desk, and I was off on the next bus.

The shuttle careered down a narrow lane (is that the old access road?) to a gate and a small employees' hut (which I'm almost sure is a refurbished bit of the old archaeologists' shed). Out came our guide, a boy -- at least, he looked like a boy to me now -- who was unused to public speaking, but who did his best. His best was not very loud, though, and our group was mostly German; one woman had been appointed interpreter for the others, which made the guide's speech even less audible. A wind came up.

We had to wait a bit, till the previous group vacated the tomb. Then we entered the passage; an aide at the entrance reminded us, with raised hand, to mind our heads. The slabs walling the passageway were much smoother than I remembered, almost glossy, polished by tourists' shoulders over the past 30 years.

Our guide illuminated some of the decorated surfaces for us. Then -- this was something new -- he extinguished the interior lighting (was that there before?) and, with a couple of remote-controlled, hidden lights, recreated the phenomenon for which Newgrange has become famous. At sunrise on the winter solstice, the first rays enter through a lintel box above the door, slip down the passage, and alight on the end burial chamber (actually, they now alight a little to the side, due to a shift in the earth's axis). We watched as an artificial light appeared on the floor and spread down to its destination, then disappeared.

That was a rather nice touch, I thought, since how many of us could participate in the real thing? Of course, our guide hastened to point out, the real thing is much brighter and more impressive, being produced by the sun and not some miserable light bulbs. Still, we got the idea. Perhaps this was compensation for taking us to the small chamber 15 at a time so that we had to thread our way under and around and through each other to examine the chamber in the minute or two allotted to free observation, before being shooed out to make way for the next group.

The waving fields are still there, but they seem farther away now, and bigger; some have been planted in potatoes. For safety reasons, the entrance has been set back into a concavity lined with gray stone, breaking the facing -- a decisive rupture with the original design. Further excavations have been carried out over the years; a site of the Beaker People -- unrelated to the tomb builders, and probably Ireland's first metal workers -- was discovered quite near the tomb, and a number of circles. All this is now set in an expanse of mowed grass. The eye admires the sweep down to the Boyne and across to the visitor center and the low hills.

I don't know. Newgrange received 220,000 visitors in 1997. Obviously such numbers have to be managed. Obviously, too, the place must be protected from vandals, who started scratching graffiti on the inner slabs in the 19th century and have only become more numerous and more mobile in the 20th. The spiral stones still impress: the quartz facing gleams, reminiscent of a grassy Jefferson Memorial.

But there is little time in which to absorb the silent mystery -- hardly silent any more -- or to examine the stones and the richness of the site. I did learn some interesting things at the visitor center, though it looks incongruous rising in modernistic splendor opposite neolithic tombs -- for instance, that the Irish climate had been warmer and drier in the tomb-building period than it is now. For that I was grateful on behalf of the Bru na Boinne people.

We scuttled out into daylight. I wanted to examine the Beaker remains a few yards away, but the blue shuttle was waiting at the foot of the hill, and I could hardly upset their apple cart twice in one day. "Everybody on?" called the driver. I was the last. And we were wafted back to the center, with its inevitable tearoom and gift shop.