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CROWDS WERE TREATED to a bit of sunlight at Newgrange this morning for the winter solstice sunrise.
The winter solstice is an astronomical phenomenon that marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice occurs on 21 or 22 December, when the sun shines directly over the tropic of Capricorn.
At sunrise on the shortest day of the year, for 17 minutes, direct sunlight can enter the Newgrange monument, not through the doorway, but through the specially contrived small opening above the entrance known as the roof box, to illuminate the chamber.
Only those who have secured a ticket through the lottery system could attend.
— Brú na Bóinne - Newgrange and Knowth (@brunaboinneOPW) December 21, 2023
Some sunlight managed to break through the clouds this morning and the chamber lit up briefly.
Meanwhile, a new Irish documentary crew have discovered evidence that a second chamber may exist in the prehistoric Newgrange monument.
After a nine-day survey of the site in 2022, a team of researchers believe they may have made the biggest discovery about the Co Meath cairn in over fifty years.
Rún na Bóinne (Secret of the Boyne), which aired last night on TG4, follows a geophysics team from Ireland and Slovakia carrying out non-invasive tests to find out more about the site’s architecture and history.
The results indicate that spaces in the cairn that look like collapsed cavities could have once been extra chambers, similar to the existing chamber, which the cavities are oddly in alignment with.
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I had me tin foil hat on. None of those feckin foreign light rays getting into my head. Coming into our monuments, illuminating places, brightening up our world. Send them back, I say. We need dark ages. Feckin Neolithics
Such a fraud…went to newgrange 2014 after years of meaning to, totally disgusted when the tour guide told us that the monument was a pile of stone and mud a couple hundred years ago and that as it is today is an interpretation of what it may have looked like thousand of years ago by a Scottish archaeologist…why would anyone a few thousand year’s ago build monument that the sun shines into on a day of the year that thunder is unlikely to shine..total fraud
@hi from heaven: well, if you are where you say you are, why don’t you ask the fella that looks like one of the Bee Gees what is the actual craic with newgrange?
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