Newgrange Experience

Letter to the Editor of The Irish Times, January 1983

Sir, The effort to cast some light on the question of some of the original purposes of Newgrange and other megalithic structures, which we constructed at least three thousand years before the coming of Christ is no easy task.

Winter Solstice sunbeam from the roof-box illuminating the chamber at Newgrange

These people had a different spiritual viewpoint than we do today. Our earliest reference to pre-Christian beliefs is to be found in St. Patrick's "Confessio" where he states. "The splendour of the material sun, which rises every day at the bidding of God, will pass away, and those who worship it will go into dire punishment. The true sun, Christ whom we, Christians, worship shall endure forever, and those who do His will shall abide with Him forever."

Here, as Thomas F. O'Rahilly states in his Early Irish History and Mythology is evidence of an unimpeachable authority that the worship of the sun was a prominent feature in the pre-Christian religion in fifth-century Ireland.

This would indicate that traditionally our ancestors used the sun as a spiritual medium, and the megaliths, especially Newgrange, and Knowth, may yet reveal through their hundreds of engraved stones, shafts of light, and shadows, information on the heavens and our place therein. That may prove to us that we are not as advanced today as we might like to think we are.

Yours, etc,
Toby R Hall,
57, Pembroke Lane,
Dublin 4.

The Stonelight team - Jack Roberts (left), Martin Brennan (centre) and Toby Hall (right). Photo by Anthony Murphy at the 'Boyne Valley Revision' conference at the Newgrange Lodge in December 2009.