Last Sunday was the Winter Solstice and in this, my first serious post for Hive (and believe me, it’s deadly serious), I paid a visit to the Knockroe Tombs, a megalithic burial site.
Knockroe dates back to around 3,000 BC and predates Newgrange, Stonehenge and even the Pyramids… allegedly.
The tombs, locally known as The Caiseal (Stone Fort), lie on the Kilkenny–Tipperary border, perched at the top of a steep hill roughly 100 metres from my house. Access involves risking life and limb wading through the raging torrents of the River Lingaun. Naturally, you can go the long way round—a leisurely 45-minute walk—or even drive, but where’s the fun in that?
Now, Knockroe is not your run-of-the-mill, everyday passage tomb that aligns with the rising sun. Oh no. Knockroe is unique: a double passage tomb aligned with both the rising and setting sun on 21 December. The sun is said to enter through the roof of the chamber, travel along the passage and strike a tall sandstone slab, dispersing light throughout the tomb, with the east facing tomb lighting up at sunrise and the west facing one at sunset.
According to Professor Muiris O’Sullivan, who began excavating the site in the 1990s and addressed Sunday’s Solstice gathering, up to a quarter of a ton of cremated human bone was uncovered, along with a variety of “grave goods” including pottery, beads and pendants.
An extensive assemblage of megalithic art was also discovered, consisting of more than thirty stones decorated with spirals, hollowed cup marks and zig-zags.
Nobody has the faintest idea what any of it means, though various theories have been proposed, one being that the artists were in some kind of trance.
Magic mushrooms, perhaps?
The oldest remains date from 3400–3500 BC, with the main period of activity around 3200 BC. After 3000 BC there is a gap of some 600 years until the Bronze Age, around 2000 BC. At the entrance to the western tomb, a tiny blue glass bead from the Iron Age was also found.
Each year, hundreds of people gather at dawn and sunset to watch the sunlight flood the tomb. Regrettably, I must report that in the four Winter Solstices I’ve attended, I have yet to see so much as a glimmer of it. This year was no different. But really, come on. It’s December. It’s Ireland, one of the least sunny places on the planet.
Still, sun be damned. Sure wasn’t there craic? Weren’t there bodhráns? And wasn’t there free punch, mince pies and, of course, the obligatory Druids. No Solstice is complete without them.
Ireland’s Office of Public Works also made its mandatory appearance. In my day, they were known as the Board of Works, or the Bored of Work, as we called them in Dublin. Aptly so, as this photograph of their representative asleep at the wheel rather neatly demonstrates.