Mary Gibbons Tours The Boyne Valley And Newgrange

5000 years old, Newgrange is located in the Boyne Valley. A world listed heritage site, Newgrange is a Neolithic Ritual Centre and Passage Tomb with architectural links to the prehistoric maritime peoples of Portugal,Northern Spain, Brittany, Denmark and the Western Isles. This building is a thousand years older than the Pyramids and the oldest astronomical observatory in the world, completely intact since the Stone Age. Its decorated entrance stone and Corbelled inner chamber display the most impressively executed examples of abstract Stone Age art of the early farming communities in Western Europe. These sophisticated early farmers were Astronomers who incorporated a light box and solar calendar into the passage. This was done to illuminate the cremated bones of the dead in the inner chamber during the Winter Solstice. It was also a symbolic technique to celebrate rebirth in the afterlife and the dawning of a new year.