(Bates) The World's First Light Show

Imagine you’re a member of a Neolithic community living in the Boyne Valley five thousand years ago. It’s the winter solstice. For the last few months, you’ve seen the sun for only a few hours a day, assuming it wasn’t raining. It’s cold. Food is scarce. Herding your animals is difficult in the darkness. People have died.

But now you and the rest of the community are crowded inside one of the three large temples situated deep within a mound of earth. It’s minutes before dawn. You’ve brought the cremated bones of your deceased loved ones and placed them on the slab of rock directly opposite the entrance tunnel. You wait silently in complete darkness, eyes on the stone aisle the crowd has left in middle of the room. Someone next to you coughs. A bird flits inside and takes roost in the rocks overhead.

Suddenly a golden shaft of light pours across the aisle, and your neighbors’ faces illuminate. The light stretches to the back wall, enveloping the bones of your loved ones and drawing forth their spirits to be reborn into the world. And as the sun’s finger touches you sixty feet inside the earth, you experience a rebirth as well.

Welcome to Newgrange, an ancient Neolithic site built approximately in 3200 BC, making it roughly five hundred years older than the pyramids. I tried to imagine what it was like to stand inside the mound 5000 years ago. Little is known about the people who built this mound, but archeologists believe it was a temple used to track the sun. This is because of the mound’s incredible architecture, which is aligned with the sunrise on the winter solstice. The sunlight that creeps in marks the end of the year’s longest night, and archeologists think it represented rebirth and a new year. This light filters through the light box, a window above the door that’s exactly parallel with the horizon and the floor of the chamber. To this day, the beam touches the back wall and lasts for seventeen minutes before disappearing. Hence, Newgrange sports more than myth and legend.

The top hole is the light box over the entrance.

Yet for me, one of the most alluring aspects about Newgrange is its preservation. While the outside was reconstructed from quartzite rocks original to the structure, the interior chamber remains untouched from day it was abandoned. Therefore, when I walked into the chamber, I knew I was walking in the footsteps of ancients. Unfortunately, photography is forbidden inside, but the domed-shaped room, spiral engravings on rocks, and stone slabs that resemble altars were enough to return me to a time when light and hope were scarce, and a simple beam of sun could break the dreariness of winter.