Ireland - Chapter Two

Day Two – Newgrange and Knowth and somehow, Galway

After several false wake ups throughout the night and strange dreams I don't remember, we sit down to a stunningly expansive irish breakfast (eggs, three kinds of fresh baked bread, endless tea, fresh fruit, oj, muesli and fresh yogurt, bacon for my mom, odd grilled tomatoes) and are joined halfway through by a young couple from Barcelona. The breakfast is intense and we flee when we've filled up too much. They give us directions to Newgrange which get us hopelessly lost, though we do stop on something called Maeve's Rath, which has absolutely no explanation about what it might be. (Later I read this.)  It was so covered in underbrush and trees it was impossible to see there was a mound there, sadly.

After asking directions from several very nice people, we found our way, in that eventual fashion of wandering on roads to and fro, to Newgrange. You have to go through the visitor's center to get access to these tombs, and we got little stickers for both Knowth and Newgrange, with enough time to wander the museum for an hour or so in the meanwhile. We did this, in typical “us” fashion, backwards and counterclockwise, which in my experience always yields more interesting results than doing things in the order you're meant to do them. We watched the movie, read all the plaques, and when the time came, we crossed the Boyne on a narrow bridge to catch a bus.

The Boyne again, I wondered? But it was a very important river – circling Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth on three sides as it bends before it meets the Irish Sea. We go to Knowth first, and our Tour guide is very good, telling us about the kerbstones that circle the mounds, about how no one can go in to Knowth itself because the passageway is so narrow and the site protected very firmly. As we are given leave to circle the area before he talks to us again on the other side, I snap photos of the megalithic art on the kerbstones, something that later becomes almost an obsession of mine, the curving, carved in designs locked on in my brain by some deep sense of focus.

I come across a stone with circles on it, and I count them smugly expecting there to be thirteen – but no, there's sixteen, and when I reach the other entrance at Knowth (which is unique among the three big sites in that it has two entrances), the guide tells me why without my needing to ask.

You see, there is a design in a couple of places at Knowth that is pretty obviously a calendar. Except it's different in many calendars in the sense of having a sixteen-something cycle, rather than twelve or thirteen, so since no one can prove it's actually a calendar, it isn't the oldest recorded calendar in the world. But if we had the proper ability to translate the neolithic communication, it would be.

We go into a chamber they've constructed beside the actual tunnel that runs through Knowth, and he explains that one of the two chambers is aligned to the Equinox sunrise, the other to the Equinox sunset. He talks about the two types of chambers, that the east-facing one is straight and the west-facing has a cross chamber, and that it is suspected one is representative of the feminine and the other the masculine energies. I am struck by this understanding of these ancient rituals, but it is far from the last surprise of my day.

We climb the mound and look out on Ireland, and I wonder if you can see Tara from here. We corner the guide afterwards, because I want to know more about the calendar, and about the theories and what he himself thinks. He tells me that while the chamber at Newgrange is aligned to the winter solstice, a lesser known fact is that Venus, every eight years, also illuminates the chamber there before the sun rises. I've already gone cold as a series of clicks and rattles of association and my personal system of beliefs, particularly surrounding the morning star, click and shift into place.

But he keeps explaining, telling us that only this year they have evidence that suggests that thousands of years ago, a tsunami struck and devastated the neolithic peoples who populated the Burren, on the other side of the island. A meteorite must have landed in the Atlantic, they say, and caused a big wave, which is one theory about why the neolithics built such precise measurements to the celestial movements. Then he asks me if I've heard of the Book of Enoch. I have, I say, not expecting him to somehow know the associations my brain has with Venus and certain angel-god mythos.

“Well,” he says, “In that book, Enoch is taken by the angel Uriel, to some unknown place among people strange and fair of hair and skin and eye, who he calls the Watchers and assumes are angels, in a place he thinks is heaven. They teach him a system of calculating the movements of the sun and stars, and their own lore, before Uriel takes him home again.” Our guide looks a little proud of this, not knowing the strange ripples he's making in the fabric of my personally held beliefs. “Wouldn't it be funny if he really came here, and the people who built Knowth and Dowth and Newgrange were an influence on ancient judiac and christian beliefs?” He laughs and I'm too surprised to ask him more, though I later regret this deeply, as I'd have liked to pick his brain for hours.

 

Guess which of the two tombs this rock was outside of.

 

But the bus is leaving to Newgrange. We get a new guide here, who tells us that we are welcome to walk around the area but due to the nature of time, we are only allowed to go into the famous passage tomb in two groups of twelve, for ten minutes.

This is somewhat disappointing, but as we walk up the hill towards the white-quartz face of the tomb, I spot a massive old tree overlooking the site and thickly populated by crows. I look closer, and yes, it's an ash tree, which leaves me feeling even more off balance than I already was. I take a lot of pictures, from various angles, because, you see, it has been my plan for many years to get a backpiece of an ash tree. I hadn't found one to use as inspiration yet, until that particular place and time. It loomed, brooding and dark-crowned, over the field before the mound.

There are many less carved kerbstones here than at Knowth but they are still lovely to look at. We are told how Newgrange was discovered, and the first group goes in before ours as we wander around.

This stone is on the exact opposite side of the tomb from the entrance one.

Then it's our turn, and we climb inside. I'm more upset than I expected to see years of graffiti, some of it from the 1880's, carved over top of the neolithic art. It's still beautiful, but I am glad now that the other sites are better protected.

They turn out the lights and do a sort of demo on what it would look like at midwinter's morning, if the weather was clear and the sun was out. It's beautiful, and haunting, and I wish I wasn't pressed in with eleven other people.

We are ushered out – I hit my head as I leave, which was only to be expected. We linger a little longer before wandering down to catch the bus back. I am mildly confused about the lack of information on Dowth, but on this trip I eventually learn that most of the archaeological work done on these tombs was in the 60's and 70's, that there are places all over Ireland just like these tombs that are untouched and unexcavated. We eat a late lunch of soup and brown bread at the visitor center and decide to drive to Galway.

On the way to the highway, we stop in Delvin to snap pictures of a ruinous structure which appeals to our love of green things growing out of ruined buildings. We drive on, and the sunset lights the sky in eerie ways. The road is empty, and we speed along for a while, stopping only once a few exits east of Athlone to use the bathroom in a lovely pub called the Cat and Bagpipes. While we want very much to have a pint there, and they half convince us to stop in Athlone for the evening, we press on to Galway city.

Sadly, I underestimated my mother's comfort level when driving on-the-wrong-side-on-the-wrong-side in a city setting, at night. We find the city center and then drive in circles for over half an hour looking for parking that won't get us ticketed, and finally land in a spot a little off the beaten track, almost in tears. There are people everywhere, cars in every parking spot, and we quickly find by wandering around the area that all hostels and hotels and walkable B&B's are full, though I do obtain a couple of maps of the city and directions to B&B row. We stop for a pint in a place that has a local brew, which I am pleased to try, and then wander on. Even the locals seem confused by the sheer number of people around us, and we still haven't found a place to stay the night.

We return to where our car is parked outside of a grubby pub called Sally Longs. This time, we go in, and are surprised to find it far more packed with locals than tourists, with what looks to be a rock band setting up in the back. I have a whiskey and my mother has a Guinness while I decide to ask someone if they know anywhere that might have rooms – and it works, because he tells me that the place directly across the street, called Salsa, lets rooms and might have one open. We march across the street.

 

A mexican restraunt, Salsa's is small and the girl behind the counter is young, and, surprisingly, from Mexico. My mother and I are fond of Mexico. The last big trip we took was to the Yucatan penninsula, and we chat with her for a while after discovering that there is indeed one last room available, and a free lot right beside Sally Longs that is no-pay on Sundays. That we happened to land right there, in the last parking spot in front of the last free room in Galway, well, we don't talk about the Luck too much. The girl tells us she came to study, and that she is happy we like Mexico because so many Americans don't like Mexicans. We try to reassure her it's not always like that and go back to Sally Longs to drink in the safety of knowing our beds are right across the street and up the stairs.

There, I start talking to a small cluster of local students, in particular a lovely girl named Rachel, from county Sligo. We compare lives and experiences of culture. She is a vegan, something very hard to do in a country whose main food groups seem to consist of meat, dairy, eggs, and potatoes. We talk about tattoos and piercings and music I can't tell and don't care if we're flirting or just making friends. By the time the bar closes, I've had several drinks and we sleep well. It rains in the early morning hours, heavily and dreamily. In the morning I take a picture of the mural on Sally Longs, and promise to come back at some point in my life, though we are off to the Aran Islands in the morning.