Newgrange Site B

Site B is an unexcavated, grass covered mound in the fields below Newgrange, on the north bank of the River Boyne.

From the river the white quartz front of the great passage tomb sits on the ridge behind it. At ground level Site B is a green hill in pasture. No kerb shows at the base, and there is no evidance of an entrance.

A mound by the river

It stands on the lowest terrace of the floodplain, on the eastern side of the bend, in the townland of Newgrange.

George Coffey identified the mound as Tumulus B on his 1912 map of the Bend of the Boyne. His map also recorded Site A, another large, unexcavated mound on the floodplain, surrounded by an embanked enclosure that has since been largely ploughed away. Michael J. O'Kelly and Claire O'Kelly included both mounds on their map of the Boyne Valley passage tomb cemetery during the Newgrange excavations of 1962 to 1975. Their investigations concentrated on the main passage tomb and damaged satellite monuments, including Sites K and Z, while Site B remained unexcavated.

In 2010 the Boyne Valley Landscapes Project classed Site B as a possible passage tomb and started a geophysical survey beside it. The survey was halted after difficulties with the landowner. Tom Condit and Mark Keegan, writing up the aerial discoveries of the dry summer of 2018, treat Site A and Site B as likely passage tombs. Stephen Davis and Knut Rassmann, in their 2021 study of the later Neolithic at Brú na Bóinne, call Site B a probable passage tomb. That judgement rests on the mound's size, shape and position in the cemetery. No chamber has been seen.

The Dagda's mound

James Fergusson, in Rude Stone Monuments (1872), described the cemetery along the north bank of the Boyne. In front of Newgrange, lower down and nearer the river, he found a smaller mound "still popularly known as that of the Dagda". Anthony Murphy identifies that mound with Site B. The position fits. Site B is the mound in front of Newgrange and closest to the water.

The medieval tale De Gabáil in tSída, "The Taking of the Síd", tells how the Dagda kept Síd in Broga, the name given to Newgrange, when he shared out the otherworld mounds. His son Oengus asked for the síd for a day and a night. When the Dagda returned, Oengus refused to leave, on the grounds that time itself is made of days and nights. Charles Squire, retelling the story in 1912, said the Dagda then "abandoned the best of his two palaces" to his son. Fergusson's local name is what places the second dwelling at the mound by the river. Fergusson hoped it still held the bones and armour of the Dagda. The archaeological expectation is a Neolithic passage tomb.

Enclosures beside the mound

The dry summer of 2018 showed the floodplain in unusual detail. Cropmarks in the grassland beside Site B picked out three enclosures, a group on the east of the flats. Condit and Keegan set them against the henges further west, including Site P and the Geometric Henge found that July by Anthony Murphy and Ken Williams.

Two of the eastern enclosures are large and roughly circular. Condit and Keegan describe each as a henge with a broad bank and an external ditch. The larger is about 160 m (525 feet) across, with its southern edge along the top of the riverbank. Davis and Rassmann measure the same riverside enclosure at an internal diameter of 154 m (505 feet), the largest henge yet traced in Brú na Bóinne, and their reading of the photographs is of a ditch without a visible bank. The second enclosure is about 120 m (394 feet) across and lies only 12 m (39 feet) from the first. A low mound sits inside it.

That mound is Site B1, recorded as ME019-058002. LiDAR in 2010 showed it off-centre within a very low embanked enclosure of about 124 by 112 m (407 by 367 feet). The 2018 photographs added a ditch outside the bank. A third enclosure, about 40 m (131 feet) across, lies near the step up to the next terrace. Condit and Keegan see an outer bank, an internal ditch and large post-holes. Davis and Rassmann find it small for an Irish henge and suggest the external ditch of a barrow, with a slight mound beside it.

The great tombs of the bend were built in the later 4th millennium BC. The henges, timber circles and palisades on the floodplain belong to the early and middle 3rd millennium BC, when people were still gathering between the ridge and the river. Site B is the mound that still rises out of that later ground.

Seeing Site B

Site B stands in private pasture. Tours from the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre go to Newgrange and Knowth. The clear view of Site B is from a distance. From the passage tomb the ground falls south to the Boyne, and this is one of the few floodplain monuments that still stands above the fields. From the south bank it sits against the sky. On a misty morning the ridge behind it can disappear.

Brú na Bóinne was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The inscription covers Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and the landscape they share. Site B belongs to that landscape, and it is one of the large mounds in the bend that remains unexcavated.