Video tour of the ancient monuments of the Boyne Valley region in Google Earth with Anthony Murphy

In this video, I take a look at the location of many of the major monuments of the Boyne Valley using Google Earth, a free program which is very useful to those researching the megalithic sites. Google Earth has high-resolution satellite imagery of Ireland and in this video, we take a look at the situation of Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, Tara, Slane, Millmount, and some of the other prehistoric sites of the Boyne region.

Those of you who don't live in Ireland can explore the ancient sites using Google Earth, taking a look at how they are located in the landscape. This video will give you a good idea of just how many sites can be seen, and also their position in the landscape and proximity to each other. There's some history too - such as the fact that Drogheda was once two towns, built on either side of the Boyne, and there's even a quick look at the place where the Boyne River is said to have its source.

Watching the northerly march of the sun as we head towards the longest days of the year

I realise that I haven't written a blog post in a while. It's not that I haven't been doing anything. Quite the opposite. One of the things that's been keeping me busy is photography. Among many other things, I've been tracking the northerly progress of the sunsets over the past month or so as we march inevitably towards summer solstice and the longest days of the year. It's just over three weeks away now, and as much as I love this time of year, personally watching the sunsets is always tinged with sadness for me. And in this blog post, I will attempt to explain why.

The sadness finds its source in a number of places. I think that its difficult to live at any latitude so removed from the equator that the difference in the length of day from midwinter to midsummer is enormous. It's not so difficult to live in Ireland in summer, when the days are long and there is a great spurt of life and growth evident all around. Winter is a very different story. The days are short, and are often shortened further by a darkness that is creeping and all-encompassing. Immersed in this darkness, all you can do is accept it, and perhaps embrace it, and wait for the days to lengthen.

A recent sunset over the Boyne from Millmount.

Summer then arrives rather abruptly. In late March, the clocks go forward by an hour. Where previously the sun was setting around 6pm, now it sets at 7, and it doesn't get dark until nearly 8. Because it's the time of equinox, the sun's rising and setting positions on the eastern and western horizons are moving at their greatest speed. The days are getting longer rapidly from Imbolc (the ancient Celtic spring festival of early February), through spring equinox, and on towards Bealtaine (early May). Before Daylight Saving Time kicks in, you are probably driving to and from work in the dark, and find that the only daylight activities you can partake in (apart from whatever work you do) are at weekends, when you try to "cram it all in".

From late March onward, you can start to enjoy the "stretch in the evenings", as it is commonly referred to here in Ireland. And very quickly, within a month, you've gone from driving home in the dark to enjoying brightness until well after 9pm.

Tonight, (May 29th, 2016) I watched and photographed the sun as it went down beneath the horizon from Millmount, a mound said to have been built by the Normans in the 12th century, but which local folklore says is an ancient burial mound. The sun finally disappeared beneath the horizon at 9.33pm. As I write, it's 10.29pm and it's still not dark.

Now don't get me wrong. I love this time of year. And I love the long evenings. I enjoy the extra light. It invigorates my spirit. There is something about the lingering of the light that I have always connected with hope, and vitality. I suppose there's probably nothing unusual about that.

However, part of the sadness that I feel, even at this time of year, stems from the realisation that inevitably the sun will reach a certain maximum setting azimuth and, after halting there for a few days, will begin to start heading south again. No sooner do the glorious days of summer arrive and suddenly the pendulum swings against us. From Millmount, the sun at midsummer appears to set over Hill of Rath, in the direction of another hill at Collon known as the Black Hill. I wonder if this name is one of many place names in Ireland that might possibly be explained through such astronomical alignments. Is it called the Black Hill because it marks the place from which the sun turns back, towards the shorter days and darker evenings?

Today was a particularly glorious day in the Boyne Valley. It was warm and sunny and the whole valley is alive with the business of summer. People were out in droves, walking, playing, relaxing. It was one of those days when you might say to yourself, "if it was like this all the time you'd never want to leave."

But some of us are so married to the place - despite the sometimes endless rain, and the short cold days of winter - that we never leave it anyway.

The swifts and swallows and house martins, having recently arrived back from their faraway wintering grounds in Africa, perhaps conversely remind us of our own rooting to place, our connection to home, something that, until the invention of powered flight, was largely intrinsic to our lives as humans. We might have ventured across the globe as a species, but locally, once we find home, we tend to stay there. And sometimes, bound to that spot on the earth by our sense of belonging, and perhaps reinforced by our sense of community, we might wish that, like the swallow, we could just alight into the great air and fly off somewhere else for the winter, leaving the harsh chill behind.

One of the other things that makes me sad, even on these lovely long evenings of summer, is the fact that the relentless movement of the sun, and the consequent brightening and darkening of the days, is an eternal reminder of the fleeting and changing nature of our own lives. There, reflected in the everyday movements of that golden ball upon which we depend for so much, we see in vivid reality the corruptible nature of our own carnal selves. Just as the day rises tentatively in the east, and the noon comes brightly to strengthen the day, the evening arrives all too swiftly and the day is spent. All this is extended and magnified in the great drama of the seasons, and all too quickly the autumn arrives, with its fallen leaves and drooping spirits ushering in the harsh winter.

The setting sun in early May viewed from Millmount.

So even as we watch the sun dropping down onto the far green-grey hills in the warm evening, we contemplate the relentless march of time, and of season, and how the winters and summers rise and fall with alarming haste. And we think back, perhaps, to the metaphorical dark and bright seasons in our own lives - times when we might have enjoyed a fulsome vitality, or times when maybe there was darkness or a lack of light. We might think of people - friends, relatives or acquaintances - upon whose lives the sun set all too soon.

All of which gives us good reason to enjoy, as much as possible, while we have the time, and while we might be able to, the glorious coming of the long evenings of summer.

And perhaps, as we watch that sinking red orb strike the horizon, we might remember also the ancient ancestors who possibly stood at the same spot and watched that same sun disappear into the earth.

Stormy sky over Drogheda

Evening storm clouds over Drogheda. In the centre of the photo is the martello tower at Millmount, which sits on the top of a large earthen mound. The mound is said to have been raised by the Normans in the 12th century AD, but local folklore says it is the burial place of an ancient Milesian bard, Amergin, who is said to have arrived from Spain in the 17th century BC. Recent archaeological investigations of the mound have revealed the possibility that it might be a mound of earth dating into prehistory.

http://bit.ly/MI-gallery
from Flickr http://flic.kr/p/GyDtRB

No passage-tomb under Millmount?

Millmount might not have been built on a Stone Age passage-tomb, a public presentation of archaeological data heard last night in Drogheda.

However, one intriguing possibility based on the results of advanced archaeological techniques is that it might perhaps have been built on a clay mound, like a barrow, a type of burial monument dating to the Bronze Age, and therefore later than the likes of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth.

Millmount might have been built on an ancient burial mound.

But it's still too early to say for certain what lies beneath the mound of Millmount, if anything. The new data is from the latest phase of the Millmount Archaeological Remote Sensing project, aptly shortened to MARS, because some of the technology being used is out of this world!

The presentation was given by Kevin Barton of Landscape and Geophysical Services (LGS), Conor Brady of the Department of Archaeology, Dundalk Institute of Technology, and Brendan Matthews, the Old Drogheda Society Community Historian.

The data presented last night was generated using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT). The GPR data was taken along eight transects of the mound, and Kevin Barton revealed that the signal "was totally absorbed" by the mound, indicating that it might consist largely of clay. This would seem to rule out the possibility that it is a cairn, built largely of stone, like Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. There was a possibility of a slight "overlapping of layers" of clay in the mound, but this was by no means definite.

The Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) data was perhaps the most exciting. This involves putting stainless steel electrodes into different parts of the mound and measuring the resistance based on Ohm's Law (Resistance equals voltage divided by current). A series of measurements were taken at the base of the mound, just above the modern revetment wall, spaced at 5 metres apart. There were four distinct "high resistance" areas along the perimeter of the base of the mound, with low resistance areas underneath them. Eighteenth century drawings show that Millmount had four towers around its base, and these four areas of high resistance might correspond to the location of those four towers.

Four sections of the mound were also measured using ERT, and Kevin Barton revealed results from these measurements which appeared to show a quite distinct area of low resistance at the core of the base of the mound. He said this area of low resistance would correspond in his mind to a large clay mound. However,  he said he could not rule out the possibility of a "cavity" in the interior - something like a passage-tomb or maybe a cist grave.

It would not have been uncommon for Bronze Age barrow to be built over a burial, which sometimes might be contained in a cist grave. This is basically a "box" consisting of large slabs of stone.

Community Historian Brendan Matthews suggested that a Bronze Age barrow-type mound might tie in with the mythology of the site, and that as the reputed burial place of Amergin, the figurehead of the Milesians who landed at the Boyne Estuary, a Bronze Age date might be more apt.

Earlier in the night, Conor Brady of DkIT gave an overview of the types of mounds found in Meath and Louth, including passage-tombs, barrows and a large number of unclassified mounds.

Brendan Matthews revealed that a small section of what might have been an earlier revetment wall, set back some distance from the modern wall, was found during a recent "cleaning up" of the site. He also showed a photo of a stone-lined drain which was found near the top of the mound.

Millmount as it looked in the 1740s, drawn by Thomas Wright.

He revealed that no major modifications had taken place at Millmount from around 1672 until the British fortified the site and built the martello tower on top of the mound in 1807-8. But in the mid 1780s a ditch around the base of the mound was filled in, and local people used it for gardening!

The presentation provoked a lot of questions from the audience, and there's no doubt it has focused minds on the possibility that Millmount is not a passage-tomb, and not, as suggested locally, contemporary with the great mounds of Brú na Bóinne.

However, there have been several people who reported in the 20th century that they had been inside a tunnel under Millmount, and so it is obvious from contemporary accounts that there is at least one subterranean passageway in there. Whether this is part of a passage-tomb structure, or maybe a medieval souterrain, or even perhaps tunnels built linking the 17th century towers is a matter of conjecture right now.

At this point, the Old Drogheda Society will be discussing the possibility of moving on to the next phase of the project, which involves a seismic technique that measures the response of sound waves through the monument. That could provide a more definitive overview of the mysterious mound of Millmount.

The search for Amergin and Drogheda's Stone Age past

Drogheda Museum / Old Drogheda Society
Special HERITAGE WEEK lecture

Is Millmount really a passage-tomb? 

THE SEARCH FOR AMHAIRGIN – Looking deep into Millmount’s past …

By Kevin Barton & Conor Brady
THURS 22 AUG 2013 – 8pm
Governor’s House, Millmount Cultural Quarter

Using the latest geophys technology Drogheda Museum begin a year-long project to look deep into the ancient mound at Millmount in a search for Drogheda’s Stone Age …

It is thought that the mound at Millmount in Drogheda was originally part of the great Megalithic (“large stone”) Culture which flourished in the Boyne Valley from 5,000BCE to 2,000BCE and includes the internationally-famous tombs of Newgrange and Knowth. Its importance in our collective folk memory is underlined by the legend that the mythological figure Amhairgin (pronounced “Aver-gin”) the originator of song and poetry is buried there.

Because of the huge amount of structural changes on the mound over the millennia normal archaeological excavation is impossible but now through the wonders of modern electronic remote sensing (“geophys”) we can scan deep into Millmount and begin to unlock its secrets.

Leaders of the Project Team, Kevin Barton of Landscape & Geophysical Services  and Conor Brady, Lecturer in Archaeology at DKIT will launch the research programme with a special lecture in The Governor’s House Millmount on Thursday 22 Aug 2013 at 8pm.

In Early Irish mythology Amhairgin ("aver-gin") was the inventor of song and poetry as implied in his name ("Amhair"=singing; "gin" = give birth to). The extraordinary poem/song associated with him, Duan Amhairgine (The Song of Amhairgin), was therefore regarded by the Old Irish as the first song ever made and was always placed first in collections of poetry.

The power of this poem in Old Irish is such that a whole array of famous poets in many languages have attempted translations. Among them was the great English poet Robert Graves who said that “English poetic education should, really, begin not with Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin.”

Many composers and songwriters have also set versions of the text to music including this one in the original Old Irish by Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance) from the BBC series "The Celts".