Climbing Slieve Gullion to see Calliagh Berra's House, the highest passage-tomb on the island of Ireland

I was up at Slieve Gullion today and decided to go and visit one of the ancient archaeological gems of Ireland that I had never seen before - the Calliagh Berra's House. This is a passage-tomb with covering cairn located on the summit of Slieve Gullion in County Armagh, at 570m above sea level. It is the highest passage-tomb in Ireland.

Setting out on the ascent up the path towards Calliagh Berra's House on Slieve Gullion.

Thankfully, there's a roadway that brings you to a small car park that is already 360m above sea level, so the walk/climb on foot is only a further 200m or so in elevation. Still, despite our brisk pace, it took my teenage sons and I about half an hour to make the climb. It was a dull day, although not cold, with only a light breeze. All the time it felt like it was going to rain but it mostly held off except for a very light drizzle for a few minutes at the top.

Looking south from Armagh towards Slieve Fuad (Fews Mountains).

The pathway up the mountain offers some beautiful views over the surrounding countryside. This was an excursion that stirred some excitement for me. I have long been a visitor to Sliabh na Calliagh, Loughcrew, hills in Meath scattered with ancient megalithic remnants. The two - Loughcrew and Slieve Gullion - are not only connected through their eponymous hag/goddess, but also through an alignment involving winter solstice.

As you get to the top of the path the cairn finally comes into view.

The path twists and turns and has been nicely laid out with smooth rocks in places, gravel in others, and just turf pathways in others. However, about halfway up things become more steep and the climb is a wee bit more arduous. This was no deterrent for my 14-year-old twins, who looked as nimble as Legolas running along the mountain ridges of Middle Earth. We met a man who said he was waiting on a bus! I suggested perhaps he was waiting on a helicopter. Truth be told, it might even be possible that a fairy bus does pass this way every once in a while.

The Calliagh Berra's Lake on the top of Slieve Gullion. Beyond it is another cairn, called the Northern Cairn.

The top of the mountain is remarkable. It has a small lake on it, known as the Calliagh Berra's lake. There is a story about Fionn Mac Cumhaill and this lake, which is nicely recounted on the Ring of Gullion website:

Fionn walked up the slopes of Slieve Gullion to the lake near the summit to find a beautiful young lady sobbing on the water’s edge. Being a gentleman he enquired as to why she was crying; to which she replied that she had dropped her golden ring in the bottomless lake. Without a moment’s hesitation Fionn ripped off his shirt and dived in, swam down until he found the ring, grabbed it and returned to the top only to find an old hag laughing, the Calliagh Berra. The witch had tricked Fionn and he fell out on the lake’s shore as an old withered man. When Fionn came down the mountain, no-one recognised him, not even the Fianna! However, when his trustworthy Irish Hounds smelled the old man they knew that he was their Master. Fionn, the Fianna, and the hounds forced the Calliagh Berra to restore Fionn to his youth, but it is said that his hair remained white like an old man’s for the rest of his life, and that his fate is said to befall anyone who bathes in the lake to this very day. Are you brave enough to dip your feet in the Calliagh Berra’s lake?

The cairn itself is known as Calliagh Berra's House and is just one of many ancient megalithic remnants that is named in her honour. At last we got the opportunity to enter its ancient passageway. It seemed like I had been waiting to do this for a long time. I've only ever imagined what it would be like because I had never seen it before. You have to hunker down at the entrance which takes a bit of nimble movement, but once inside the main thing to concern yourself with is the rocks on the floor. It would be very easy to sprain an ankle in there because the floor is so uneven.

Inside the chamber of Calliagh Berra's House looking out through the passage entrance.

The chamber and rear recess of the passage-tomb on the top of Slieve Gullion.

You certainly get the sense of a devoted, determined and stoic people. They built this cairn out of rocks - large and small - on top of a mountain in a far-distant age (around 5,000 years ago, maybe more) at a time when there was no proper footwear, and nothing like construction site health and safety. Building passage-tombs must have been a dangerous occupation in those times. It takes effort just to climb the mountain. But then to start hauling stones around the place in the cutting wind and inevitable rain must have been an undertaking requiring a serious devotion to the task. Calliagh Berra obviously commanded a pious respect among the ancient megalithic builders.

Another thing that strikes you is the lack of megalithic art. And indeed the lack of enormous structural stones such as those you find at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth - the large corridor orthostats, the bulky ceiling cap stones, the three-tonne kerb stones. This is a different type of structure to the Brugh na Bóinne complex. Similar in some respects, but different in others.

Sitting at the entrance of the passageway into Calliagh Berra's House.

They say first impressions last though. And Calliagh Berra's House made a deep impression on me. Such that I can say I would love to go back - and soon. Ideally in better weather, which makes for better photos. A trip up there for winter solstice sunset would be a distinct possibility. I'd love to see the sun shining in there as it sets beyond the distant hills of Loughcrew.

One thing that did slightly disappoint was the lack of a marker for Loughcrew on the direction plate on top of the cairn. However, even on a murky day like today the views are still beautiful. On a clear day, it's apparently possible to see the Slieve Bloom Mountains some 85 miles distant.

Upon turning to leave, it's not difficult to see how landscape made such a deep impression upon the imaginative and creative sensitivities of ancient people. Ireland is a beautiful country. I am reminded of this constantly. The journey back down the mountain created a greater awareness of that fact than the journey up. When you climb a hill or mountain, you are ever looking on ahead, upwards, towards the summit, the goal. You have a determination, and must concentrate your energies on getting there. On the way down, it's as if you have lightened your load, and the landscape unfurls beneath you. Even with the approaching rain, it looked heavenly. And that's a stark reminder of the real power that elevated megalithic sites must have had - engendering a sense of detachment from the sublunary world, providing an encroachment into the upper, divine levels, away from humdrum civilisation and altogether closer to something austere, numinous and regenerative.

Maps of the cairns at Sliabh na Caillighe, Loughcrew

I've created maps of the cairns at Sliabh na Caillighe/Loughcrew, using Bing Maps. The cairns are believed to be older than Newgrange, dating possibly to 3500BC, and were given letter designations by Eugene Conwell, who excavated some of them in the 1860s. The hill known as Carnbane West today was, according to local folklore, known previously simply as Carnbane (from carn bán, the "white cairn"). The hill labelled Carnbane East today was known in the past as Sliabh na Caillighe, the Mountain of the Hag.

The best known of the cairns are Cairn T, called the Hag's Cairn, which is aligned towards sunrise on the equinoxes, and Cairn L on Carnbane, which is aligned towards sunrise at Samhain (November) and Imbolc (February).

For more on the Samhain alignment of Cairn L, see this page.
For more on the equinox alignment of Cairn T, see this page.

Don't forget to watch the video below, in which I give a quick overview of the hills of Loughcrew using Google Earth. This will give you a sense of where the various cairns are located and which are considered the principal peaks. It will also give you a good idea of the location of the cairns in relation to the Brú na Bóinne complex (Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth):

Spend a few minutes at Newgrange enjoying the sights and sounds of evening in this beautiful video

This is a video of Newgrange in the evening time in summer. It's such a tranquil and beautiful place to spend time, as this video shows. Listen to the sounds of the birds and the animals and take yourself to this sacred spot overlooking the Boyne for a few minutes of bliss.

It is strongly advised that you watch this short video in full screen mode in high definition and with either good speakers or headphones. Enjoy!

Dowth and the story of hunger - ancient monument built during a famine and almost destroyed during one too

I was at Dowth on the Summer Solstice, which was on Monday last. It was nice to be at Dowth on the longest day of the year, and quite fitting because of an ancient myth about the site. I was with a small group, talking about the mythology of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the sun was beating down from its height at the very apex of its circuit through the zodiac. We could not see it, but at that moment the sun was being carried across the sky by the great constellation Orion.

Dowth at midnight tonight. Even with cloud cover, it's still bright enough to see. I added some kerb light!

There is a myth about how and why Dowth was constructed, contained in the Metrical Dindshenchas, the oldest versions of which are found in the 12th century Lebor na Nuachongbala (known as the Book of Leinster). As I sat there in the sunshine at Dowth, I wondered about the sudden darkness that is described in the Dindshenchas story about Dubthach/Dowth, the darkness that broke a powerful spell.

The king at the time, according to the story, was Bressal Bódibad (the second part of his name means "lacking in cattle", for reasons that will become obvious). He wished to build a "solid hill", in the likeness of the tower of Nimrod, "so that from it he might pass to heaven". It is said that "the men of all Erin came to make for him that hill" and that they came to do it all in one day.

The endless day of the Dowth myth might be Summer Solstice.

The king's sister cast a spell on the sun, so that "there should be no night but bright day till the work reached completion". Those of you familiar with my work will know that I think this is a reference to the Summer Solstice, when the daylight is pretty much continuous, and when the sun's rising and setting positions appear to halt on the horizon, i.e. the sun stands still. At this latitude, even in the middle of the night we get a constant twilight, giving enough light to enable us to see in the dark. This is obvious in the main photo above, taken tonight at midnight. Even with 90% cloud cover, it was still bright enough to see what I was doing without extra light.

The king's sister is not named in the surviving Dindshenchas verse about Dowth. However, as the work progresses, the King commits incest with her, and the spell is broken. Night falls suddenly. The men abandon the construction project. "Since darkness has fallen upon our work, and night has come on and the day is gone, let each depart to his place".

What's interesting about this grand project, which seems an extraneous project orchestrated by an egotistical and megalomaniacal king, is that the legend says it was built during the time of a great famine:

"In his time a murrain came upon the kine of Erin, until there was left in it but seven cows and a bull."

At the height of this famine, the king gathered all the men of Erin to this place to build him a tower so that he could reach heaven. Is this a description of slave labour? If there is any real substance to the myth as a record of actual historical events, it must be pointed out that surely the worst time to ask human beings to indulge in heavy physical work is when they are famished. However, that's what the story says. They built it during a murrain, with only eight cattle left on the whole island of Ireland to sustain its population. This aspect of the story is, we gather, allegorical. But it is interesting in light of a strange coincidence between myth and reality that has always been obvious to me but which I only came to realise the true significance of this past Summer Solstice a few days ago.

That coincidence is this - Dowth was said to have been built during a famine, and it was almost destroyed during one too.

Moving from myth into factual, recorded history, we skip forward in time to the 1840s AD. In the years 1847-48, R.H. Firth, at the behest of the Committee of Antiquities of the Royal Irish Academy, carried out a disastrous excavation of the Dowth monument which caused it considerable damage. A commentary in the Drogheda Conservative newspaper in 1856 describes it thus:

"...we find that beautiful tumulus literally torn to pieces".

The crater in Dowth left by the 1840s excavations.

Large amounts of cairn material were removed, and tossed over the sides, in an ill-fated attempt to find some treasure, or central chamber containing perhaps trinkets that might make men rich. But as I always say, the true treasure of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth are not any material goods that might be found within them. Their true treasures are much, much deeper.

An even greater tragedy about the Firth excavation is the fact that this rich man's treasure hunt occurred during the Great Famine, when the failure of the potato crop due to blight caused death and starvation for hundreds of thousands.

"It is interesting to note that, in the middle of the Great Famine, during which a million Irish people died and another million emigrated, the esteemed gentlemen of the privileged class had nothing better to occupy their thoughts than an ill-conceived and unsuccessful 'treasure hunt' at Dowth, for which a special subscription had to be raised, while the population was suffering one of the worst calamities in Irish history". (Newgrange - Monument to Immortality, p.103, by this author)

Fascinatingly, there is perhaps a hint in the Dindshenchas myth about its future fate at the hands of Firth and his colleagues. Is this an example of the prescience of myth?

"From that day forth the hill remains
without addition to its height;
it shall not grow greater from this time onward
till the Doom of destruction and judgement".

A Brigid's Cross left at Dowth on the Summer Solstice.

Notwithstanding the obvious Christian intrusion into this verse, with its mention of judgement, the story suggests that no more would be added to Dowth's height. Could this be taken to suggest, perhaps, that something would in fact be taken from its height? Today, there is a large crater in the cairn (see photo above), and its height is much diminished as a result of this reckless "excavation" of the 19th century, if we could dare to call it an excavation. In essence, the myth's prophetical aspect has been substantiated through real events.

And the synchronism of events, mythical and real, leads us to consider the Dindshenchas verse as not mere poetry for amusement, but as a mytho-prescient work with far-reaching vision through the long and sometimes tortuous history of this island. It is not alone in that regard, and I am especially drawn to the Lebor Gabala - the "Book of Invasions" and how that presaged a series of real invasions, as if forecasting a dire series of raids before they ever happened. But that's for another day.

Tonight at Dowth, on St. John's Eve, I took some photos of the mound against the light of the midsummer sky. It doesn't last long, but I love the midnight twilight in the Boyne Valley.

Rare exquisite drawings of Newgrange from 1866

A sketch of the entrance to Newgrange published in 1866.

These two drawings of Newgrange are extraordinary. I've never seen them until today. And even though I've written a book about Newgrange and might be considered something of an expert on the monument, I'm pretty sure I've never seen them replicated in any modern book on the subject. I could, of course, be wrong, but certainly I have no memory of ever seeing them before. Which is why seeing them today for the first time has been such a beautifully pleasant surprise. They were published in a book (it's name I will reveal in another blog post soon!) in 1866, and so belong to a time when we weren't exactly sure what Newgrange looked like. We have earlier drawings and paintings, by the likes of Vallancey and Ledwich etc., and then photographs from the late 19th century onwards. Here is a unique moment in the Newgrange timeline. The mound is considerably overgrown with trees. In fact, they almost smother the entrance. There is something extraordinarily romantic and evocative about the above drawing.

Views similar to the one below have been seen before, but I've never seen an early drawing or sketch from that particular angle. Again, I think that this might be a unique image, having not seen the light of day in modern times. I am, of course, open to correction, and if anyone can put me right, please do!

I've gone to the trouble of performing a Google Image search and these two images don't have a match, so it would appear they are not on the internet at all - until now. There is a not dissimilar view to this one contained in a book by David MacRitchie called 'Testimony from Tradition', published in 1890:

I would be very interested in hearing from anybody who might have seen the first two images before. I have checked any books about Newgrange here in my own library and am pretty sure that it is not featured in any of those.

Ever wondered what the inside of Dowth looks like?

This is one of the most interesting and useful videos relating to the Boyne Valley that I've seen in a long time. It's a fly-through tour of Dowth's northern and southern chambers based on laser scanning and gives you a real sense of what it's like inside. The survey work was carried out by David Strange-Walker of Trent & Peak Archaeology and Marcus Abbott of ArcHeritage. Thanks to Dr Steve Davis of University College Dublin, and the Office of Public Works, Ireland, for funding this project.

I was inside Dowth's northern chamber a number of years ago. I visited with a group, and we accessed this chamber through the souterrain, just as shown in this video. The imagery is from real scans, and is therefore incredibly accurate.

Those of you who have visited Dowth for the sunset at winter solstice might be familiar with the interior of the southern chamber, which is the shorter, circular chamber. However, the northern chamber is completely off bounds to the public - at least those who might never get the chance to go inside it can now do so virtually. Fantastic stuff.

Newgrange then and now - pre and post excavation

Just some food for thought. These photos show Newgrange before, during and after the restoration/conservation work which took place during the archaeological excavation of the mound in the 1960s and 1970s. On top is a picture of the monument as it appeared before the archaeological work. The second picture shows the giant concrete wall which was added to the front of the mound. The main purposes of this wall are to prevent cairn slippage out over the kerbstones, which had happened previously in the Bronze Age, and to securely fasten the white quartz and granite cobble stones which form the modern facade. These stones were found to be on the ground, beneath the cairn slip material. The archaeologist deduced from experimentation that the quartz had to have been placed on the front of the mound in order to have ended up underneath the cairn slip material. Interestingly, some kerbstones had fallen over as a result of the cairn slippage. There was no quartz underneath the stones that had fallen over!

Beautiful Dowth winter shots from Anne Marie Moroney

For some years, a row of evergreen trees growing to the southwest of Dowth has gradually blocked the light from the setting sun at Winter Solstice entering the southern chamber of the Neolithic cairn. However, a couple of years ago, with the permission of the land owner, there was some trimming of the trees which allowed sunlight back into the chamber - with glorious results, as can be seen in these photos, which were taken by Anne Marie Moroney in early January 2011. Anne Marie, author of 'Dowth - Winter Sunsets', has been studying the phenomenon for years.