You can now pre-order Newgrange book from Liffey Press

I am delighted to report that you can now pre-order 'Newgrange - Monument to Immortality' from The Liffey Press. The text of the book was completed a couple of weeks ago and I will shortly deliver the photos. All going well, the book will be published in mid October and will be launched around that time.

At this stage I expect there will be a major launch in Drogheda or the Boyne Valley followed by a number of smaller launches around Ireland. There will probably be a talks tour too, and I have already tentatively agreed a couple of speaking engagements to help promote the book.

This has been in some ways a very personal and philosophical journey for me. This is not a history of Newgrange necessarily. It does cover a lot of the archaeology and the history of exploration of Newgrange, but it is a much broader work in the sense that it looks at spirituality and maybe the reasons why we are so fascinated by ancient sites such as Newgrange. Here is the blurb from the Liffey Press website which sums it up nicely:

Many people who visit the ancient and magnificent Newgrange monument in the Boyne Valley are driven by some deep longing to connect with their most distant roots. The giant 5,000-year-old megalithic construction evokes awe and wonderment, and a keen sense of melancholy for the community of people who created and fashioned it from stone and earth in the remote past, a people now lost to time. For the past two centuries, archaeologists, antiquarians, writers and researchers have been probing Newgrange in the hope of revealing something about its purpose, and something about the mysterious people of the New Stone Age who created giant structures using primitive technology. What has become clear from these investigations is that Newgrange is a uniquely special place, and that its construction was carried out not by a grizzly mob of grunting barbarians, but rather by an advanced agrarian community who had developed keen skills in the sciences of astronomy, engineering and architecture. In Newgrange: Monument to Immortality, writer and researcher Anthony Murphy goes deep into the mind and soul of his neolithic ancestors to attempt to draw forth some answers to these questions. In a deeply moving, poetic and philosophical exploration, he looks beyond the archaeology and the astronomy to reveal a much more profound and sacred vision of the very spirit of the people who were driven to such marvellous and wondrous efforts.