... MORE LIKE OLD-GRANGE!

WE WENT TO NEWGRANGE AND THE BRU NÁ BOINÉ archeological sites. It was cool! They were built in the freakin' STONE AGE! Thats borderline paleontology stuff baby, which is probably the best of all the -ologies.

Anyway the largest tomb is in a site called Knowth, with one 95m diameter tomb and about 10 satellite tombs. Each one has huge boulders moved from the river 50km west and the mountains 80km east. Basically it was totally cool. And 600 years older than those wussy pyramids and 1000 years older than lame-ass Stonehenge.

We were able to go inside one of the tombs (the body was removed by Victorian bastards) and it was pretty neat. The way the tomb works is it has a lightshaft inside it and at 8.58 to 9.17am on December 21st (the winter solstice) the light shines directly into the central chamber. Which is where we were standing.

Unfortunately I couldn't take any photo's inside the chamber, no camera's allowed, but it was pretty interesting. The 'recreated' the sun shinings into the chamber with a flashlight, which wasn't entirely impressive, but they assured us the actual thing was.

The bottom photo (the dark one of the tunnel) was taken inside the chamber at Knowth (which is not the big one with the sunlight. It was actually closed to visitors because it was too unsafe and too Indiana Jones like for us. Which incedentially we had watched the night before which made everything 10x cooler.


IESSO

PS. The tombs totally look like Hobbit Houses or a Smurf villiage. Tee Hee! ^_^



PPS. This photo was taken in Dublin after we got back. UNG isn't upset, I just caught her thinking and she just LOOKS upset. Don't worry, I didn't upset her. But I don't think you'll believe that.