Day Thirteen: Ancient Ireland

This will be the last full day of my trip, and I will be spending it (mostly) exploring ancient archeological sites, including the extremely important UNESCO site, Brú a Bóinne, a collection of religious sites that predate both Stonehenge and the Pyramids by several hundred years. Like with the Giant’s Causeway, times entry is required. However, unlike yesterday I have to get a timed ticket because there is no other way of accessing the site. I got a ticket for 11 am, so I needed to get from Belfast to Brú na Bóinne by around 10:30 am or so.

I woke up early in an enormous bed in the huge purple apartment that Malmaison Belfast set me up in, and got packed up. It was raining in Belfast and even if I had the time, I didn’t have any inclination to go traipsing in the rain for a couple of hours, so I watched a TV episode, cross stitched, and then around 7:30 am I said goodbye to my room and went downstairs to check out. Malmaison validates parking at the garage I parked at, so I just had to pay £18.50 for the entire time I was parked there, significantly cheaper than Dublin and Galway.

Aww. Bye bye Malmaison…

I broke out my umbrella for the first time on this trip, and started walking the short distance to the Victoria Square mall where I had parked. Zero drama getting into the garage and after shuffling a few things around and getting my GPS sorted, I was on my way out of Belfast. In the rain.

I’ve noticed that there are SO MANY more big trucks/lorries on the road up here, and driving on the highway was a bit annoying since you’re constantly having to go around them. I also realized (probably very belatedly, that something was off about the speed limit). The posted sign said 60 but everyone on the highway was going SIGNIFICANTLY faster than that. So, I was keeping up with the traffic, thinking that this was probably a beltway situation where the speed limit is 55, but if you’re going under 70, you’re going to get run over. So I was running about 100-110 based on how fast everyone else was going.

This is all it said!

It was only when we passed over the border into Ireland and I saw a speed limit sign posted for 120 that I realized two things I had been extraordinarily stupid about in the last 48 hours.

The first is that I had been seeing gas for 1.56 and thought that was significantly cheaper than the 1.76-1.85 I had been seeing in Ireland. And the second was that this issue about the speed limit had to have been incorrect.

And here, dear readers, is where I’m going to call myself out for being a dumb American driving in another country. The rental car I’m driving has a speedometer in kmh. Ireland also uses the Euro (it’s a part of the EU) while Northern Ireland uses the British Pound. So I had made the classic mistake of not converting anything.

Speed limits/speedometers in the UK are in mph, so the 60 was mph and that meant that driving 100 kmh was perfectly fine. And £1.56/liter is equivalent to €1.81, so the gas is not cheaper either. Everyone that drives between the two locations must just have these basic kmh/mph conversions in their head so they don’t have to worry about it, but I wonder how often that comes up with speeding violations, because there is minimal signage when you go from one country to the other. Not even any border control that I could tell whatsoever.

So I didn’t get a speeding ticket on the UK or Irish highway and stopped for gas right over the border (it was cheaper after conversion). I got to Brú na Bóinne around 9:45, over an hour early, but the weather was gorgeous and I figured I could just sit in the cafe and kill time if need be.

I walked through the great visitor center museum and took my time getting to watch their video guides rather than rushing through anything, and then sat in the cafe and had a scone with butter and jam for morning tea while I waited on my tour.

Brú na Bóinne (Palace of the Bóinne) is an impressive collection of passage mounds built on the banks of the River Boyne (Abhainn na Bóinne), a sacred river in Ireland. We started at Knowth (pron. “Know-th) and got to spend an hour with the guide giving us a very detailed history of the site and the various groups of people that used it over several thousand years.

A really interesting point is that since it was a burial site, and over 200 remains were found, they know that the people that originally built the mounds have no genetic relation whatsoever with the later Irish people, being originally from Anatolia (modern day Turkey) so they likely would have had a more Mediterranean appearance as opposed to the later Irish who came from Western Europe/Ukraine and had lighter features. No one knows what happened to the Neolithic people who built the tombs.

Our bus took us to the next site, Newgrange, which was the first site to be extensively excavated, and it’s the only mound that you’re actually allowed to enter. The passageways into the chamber are narrow in places and you have to sidle your way through, but the chamber is amazing inside (unfortunately no photos allowed). It has a domed roof and three niches that would have held bowls where the cremate remains of those buried here would have been placed. Newgrange is also a fascinating site because it has a solar portal over the door that, during sunrise on the winter solstice the light comes into the chamber and illuminates the room. Such sophisticated construction techniques that would have had to have been refined over many more hundreds of years before these cathedral-like mounds were built.

On the outside Newgrange has a white quartz facade, but this was something originally reconstructed using the materials at the site, and we don’t know for certain if that’s how it would have appeared. The assumption is that the materials slipped off over time, and were found surrounding the mound. So how it looks today is how an archeologist imagined the materials found there might have been used at the site. It would be really impressive if it were accurate, but we just can’t know for sure.

The Newgrange triple spiral!

At the entrance to the mound is a stone with elaborate spirals carved on it, including the triple spiral that has only ever been found at Brú na Bóinne, unlike some of the other abstract motifs that have been used in other Mesolithic sites around Europe.

The last mount at the site, Dubhadh (Dowth) is mostly collapsed (and not reconstructed) so we were unfortunately not able to see it. The bus returned us to the visitor center around 2:30 pm so I had spent five hours at the site, and it felt like it had only been a couple of hours at most. So many things to see!

I got back in the car to see one last site before I went in search of my pub for the night. Off to the Hill of Tara we go! The Hill of Tara is a the political and spiritual seat of power in ancient Ireland, and it’s the location where the Kings of Ireland were inaugurated.

I rambled along country roads in the middle of nowhere until a random car park and a few shops appeared seemingly out of nowhere. I parked the car and walked up to the site, which is not access controlled and basically everyone was wandering all over it.

The site itself is a series of mound works, so it’s pretty much impossible to discern what you’re looking at while you’re walking around, except for the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. I walked through the grounds and from its point on the hill, like Knowth, you can see the entire area for miles around. It’s easy to see why places like this sent a powerful symbolic message.

The Liá Fáil! Apparently it roars when the true King of Ireland places their hand on the stone.

I finally headed to the pub where I’ll be staying for the night. Actually staying above a pub is a lot of fun if you are a heavy sleeper. ‘Pub’ is short for ‘Public House’ where it would have been common to have a bar, food, and rooms for folks to stay in, so I’m going very old school. I got to the pub, checked in and moved all my bags upstairs before I located a public car park to stash the car for the night. Brogan’s is super cute and the room is a good size (and relatively quiet!).

I walked down to the shops to go investigate anything I need to bring back in my bag, and then proceeded to deconstruct my checked bag so that I could repack it. The goal is to get as much as possible in my checked back so that I have more space in my carry on. It’s amazing how much you can fit if you pack carefully!

I was getting hungry for dinner so I popped down to the pub for a cider and roast beef which were both excellent. And then I needed to try and stay awake as long as possible, because it won’t be 9 pm (bedtime) in DC until it’s 2 am in Dublin. Oof. I don’t know if I’ll stay up that long, but it’s best to try to get back on the right time zone as soon as possible.

I’ve made some solid progress on this cross stitch project since I left on this trip!

This is “Reflections of Ireland” pattern by Ink Circles and I’m probably about 2/3rds the way through right now. It has a lot of hidden images including: Dublin Castle, Trinity College, Trinity Knots, Bunratty Castle, the Giant’s Causeway, harps, Irish whistles, a shamrock, Celtic cross, church warden pipes, Claddagh, bottles of whiskey and beer, and the pot of gold.

I painted a map of Ireland in my journal in January and I’ve been updating my driving trail as I’ve been traveling. All around the island in two weeks. Wild trip.