Monday 7th May

Neolithic Art.
The stop at Sally Garden pub last night was wonderful. We stayed parked in the carpark, left the pub at about midnight and the pub was still buzzing with locals chatting. I heard one car go about 2.45 but not any of the others and when we woke at 10 this morning the carpark was empty.
So we stop in Dogheda for a comfort break. It was very busy considering its a bank holiday, but being a town on the river the was an opportunity to take a photo of bridges.

Our main visit today is to be Newgrange which is part of the second most popular visitor attractions in Ireland. So you need to book a tour, this can and was done on line, so we arrived early for our 3.15 tour. The lady who dealt with our tickets was great, and said we could do the earlier tour of Knowth, which was really great as I couldn't work out how to book both on line. Before I get to today's photos, an explanation.
Newgrange and Knowth are two page tombs in the Brush Na Bonne World Heritage site in the Boyne valley. And they are supervised by OPW - Office of Public Works - so we saved another €26 today with our English Heritage membership.

Because the sites are so popular visitors are bussed to the individual sites and given an informative tour. The is a third site, Dowth, which we didn't get time to see and is accessible at all times.

The East entrance to Knowth
The tombs were all built about 2900BC, so about 500 years before the pyramids of Geeza and 1000 before Stonehenge. The large stones around the edges of both tombs have some interesting artwork that had yet to be deciphered, and anyone's suggestion is correct!




The West entrance to Knowth
Both the tombs we saw are believed to have some celebratory connection to the sun and the equinoxes. There's loads more on line than I can remember.


Entrance into Newgrange

Rock art from Newgrange
But it was nice to be able to go inside both prehistoric monuments and to see the workmanship undertaken with quite basic tools on stone from quite a wide area of Ireland.

The East tunnel at Knowth.
This site has two thirds of the world's Neolithic art, and the chamber we went into at Newgrange has stayed watertight since it's completion 5000 years ago. Isn't that fantastic?
Tonight we are staying on the marina approach road at Carlingford.