Mound

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Michael w6
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Mound

Post by Michael w6 »

I'm looking for the name of a constructed mound in Ireland with a vertical opening in the front. During the solstice or equinox the sunlight illuminates a series of notches inside the mound. I came across this awhile ago and want to find out more but cannot recall the name.
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Re: Mound

Post by Nanohedron »

I do believe you're looking for Newgrange.

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Re: Mound

Post by Michael w6 »

Ah! Yes this is it. Have you been there?
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Re: Mound

Post by Nanohedron »

Michael w6 wrote:Ah! Yes this is it. Have you been there?
Not yet, although it's on my probably-never-to-be-realized bucket list. Impressive as it is, the restoration's a bit controversial among the archaeological community, though: when work began on it, it was in such a state that there was no real way of knowing how the exterior of the mound proper might have looked originally, so today's façade is unlikely to be representative of how things would have been - but then the restorer had to do something with all those rocks, so there's always going to be someone to take issue no matter how you go about it. Quoting Wikipedia: "Neil Oliver described the reconstruction as 'a bit brutal, a bit overdone, kind of like Stalin does the Stone Age'". Be that as it may, it certainly does a good job at being a crowd pleaser.
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Re: Mound

Post by chas »

I went a couple of decades ago, but in June, so no winter solstice. I loved it, but it might not be for everybody. I would think anyone into archaeology/antiquity would be into it. There are all sorts of neat things in Ireland on a smaller scale, dolmens, beehive huts, stone circles. . .
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Re: Mound

Post by Nanohedron »

chas wrote:I went a couple of decades ago, but in June, so no winter solstice.
Were you allowed inside?
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Re: Mound

Post by Michael w6 »

I did not know its current appearance is a reconstruction.
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Re: Mound

Post by Nanohedron »

Michael w6 wrote:I did not know its current appearance is a reconstruction.
Yes, apparently it was an utter shambles before. The mound itself and its site are original and intact, but while the white façade is certainly built from material that is genuinely part of the site and was unquestionably used in some way, it is alone in that its present form is all speculation. There wasn't a lot of choice about that.

My philosophy is that things get rebuilt. For whatever reason, sometimes they're given a new appearance in the process, so it's not as if Newgrange is in any way a fake; it was simply restored with the materials at hand, and educated guesses had to do the rest. Modern Ireland is its keeper now, and as such the restoration is fine by me; how does one bemoan the loss of "authenticity" when there's nothing to draw on other than rocks lying around? Rather, the restoration represents something of the cultural hopes and dreams of the people who did it, and it's also an attempt to restore and maintain a link with the past as best as can be done. That's appropriate, I think. It's more respectful, too; better to use everything there than to throw away what only leaves you guessing.
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Re: Mound

Post by PB+J »

Nanohedron wrote:
Michael w6 wrote:I did not know its current appearance is a reconstruction.
Yes, apparently it was an utter shambles before. The mound itself and its site are original and intact, but while the white façade is certainly built from material that is genuinely part of the site and was unquestionably used in some way, it is alone in that its present form is all speculation. There wasn't a lot of choice about that.

My philosophy is that things get rebuilt. For whatever reason, sometimes they're given a new appearance in the process, so it's not as if Newgrange is in any way a fake; it was simply restored with the materials at hand, and educated guesses had to do the rest. Modern Ireland is its keeper now, and as such the restoration is fine by me; how does one bemoan the loss of "authenticity" when there's nothing to draw on other than rocks lying around? Rather, the restoration represents something of the cultural hopes and dreams of the people who did it, and it's also an attempt to restore and maintain a link with the past as best as can be done. That's appropriate, I think. It's more respectful, too; better to use everything there than to throw away what only leaves you guessing.

I'm going to disagree here. It would have been better to leave it as "a shambles" because in the decades since the restoration a number of technologies have appeared which would have added greatly to our knowledge of the people who built it and its function in their time. Ground penetrating radar, magnetic resonance imaging, LIDAR, Drone surveys--a whole bunch of technologies that would have made it possible to glean more info about the site in a non destructive way. Just a couple years ago the drought revealed evidence of unknown "henges" right nearby. But the reconstruction, while it created a compelling tourist site, destroyed a lot of information.
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Re: Mound

Post by Mr.Gumby »

It's a dilemma, I am not sure leaving things that aren't well buried will guarantee preservation, this is Ireland. There are plenty of examples of stuff that was left that just disappeared. There's a lot of stone in those things that can be used to build sheds, walls or just sold off. And it will. Farmers clear fields to be rid of things: I know a man who works for the Ordnanace Survey, at some point he told me about a place that had several dolmen, sousterrains and a ringfort. When they came back for a new survey a few years after the first visit, it was all gone.

Half a mile up the valley from where I live is a stone circle, Westropp gave a description of it, there's two stones left today, the rest were used by a neighbour, fencing etc.

Most of the big wellknown Cahers/ringforts are 19th century reconstructions, a lot of work was done during the Victorian age. There's another one in the Burren I know fairly well, Cahercommaun, the office of public works have been recornstructing there, a lot of work done some fifteen years ago (that one was well documented by a Harvard team during the earlier 20th century). But I know of several others that are just circular piles of stone, rubble mounts.

There's a lot of that sort of stuff around here, sitting in the middle of fields. If you're into that sort of thing, get a copy of Carleton Jones' book on the burren and Aran islands, ISBN 1-903464-61-7 (great armchair travelling for your lockdown)

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Re: Mound

Post by david_h »

I went to Ireland in about 1960, our family and some cousins. We stayed in Athlone. One day the contingent who were not into fishing went for a walk and noticed the map had 'Castle' marked a few miles down a track. After a long hot walk (it didn't rain the whole week we were there) we arrived and found two guys with a wheelbarrow, shovels and sledge hammers converting it into hardcore. One of the grown-ups, shocked, asked why they were knocking a castle down and got the answer "It's no use for anything". I recaall and a long hot walk back to the car and then cups of tea at a little house with a peat fire.

I think it was just a fallen down manorial pile from the late 1700s.
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Re: Mound

Post by PB+J »

The approach in most Asian cultures is famously to just keep continually rebuilding the temple and say it's been there for 1000 years, even though not a single stone or timber is original. It's a defensible approach, possibly a better approach.

When we were Ireland I went with our daughter to Knockma Hill in Galway where there are three stone...somethings on the top of the hill. We had to kind of bushwhack to find them, but more recent photos suggest the site's been cleared.

It was entirely unclear if there were neolithic sites or some Victorian gentleman's idea of a "folly." Or maybe both. Our daughter loved the site and indulged all her celtic mysticism/young adult fantasy novel impulses, but I kept wanting to see some professional assessment of what these things were.

When I was last in tralibane researching chief O'Neill I found some sites that he described were still there and others were not--either they were overgrown or people had cleared them away. There was supposedly an underground passage with niches in it, locally known as "the Dane's Fort." With some diligent searching I was able to find a little bit about it from a national archeological survey. It does seem as if Ireland has literally more of this stuff than it knows what to do with.
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Re: Mound

Post by Mr.Gumby »

The big forts on the Aran Islands are impressive but they are largely reconstructions. There are some areas in the Burren that have an incredible density of remains, from the bronze age right through the middle ages, the famine and the present day. I suppose the Office of Public Works (OPW) has a policy of preserving what is on public land and what is important but it's impossible to preserve and protect all of it. A lot of the big hilltop cairns in the Burren have never been examined closely. Other things that will pull a crowd are made accessible. The OPW finally managed to buy the land at Poulnabrone with The Dolmen (itself a part reconstruction) some fifteen years ago but a lot of this stuff is on private land.

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Knockma Hill in Galway where there are three stone...somethings on the top of the hill.
Summit cairns I would guess. Queen Maebh's burial site?

A lot of hills have cairns, some old, some less so, often small ones are actually ordnance survey triangulation points.



All of the above pics were taken less than a hour (and some a lot less) away from where I am now writing this.
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Re: Mound

Post by PB+J »

Mr.Gumby wrote:
A lot of hills have cairns, some old, some less so, often small ones are actually ordnance survey triangulation points.
Yes there were ordnance survey markers up there. And three sites, one of which had an obviously modern (last two hundred years) stone column with a mounting point for something. The whole cairn looked like it had been reconstructed at some point.

It was still a marvelous view and one of our daughter's fondest memories of Ireland

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Re: Mound

Post by Mr.Gumby »

They'd stick a metal rod in those while surveying, do their triangulation from the next points.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what's what. Not too far from here roadworkers dug up a few slabs of limestome, dug two in vertically and put the third on top as a cover stone. Doesn't look much different than the one in the first pic I posted (with the windpark in the background), you often see tourists stop to take pics.


There are various theories what the significance is of the prehistoric cairns. Some have been excavated and burials were found inside them, some think they may have been territorial markers of some sort. The one in the pic above is on Turlough Hill, which has a very large enclosure on its top, with a cairn, walls, and remains of many hut and house sites. Ofcourse the locals will tell you there were two witches on adjacent hills having a quarrel and throwing stones at eachother from one hill to the other, each ending up with a pile of stones on its top.
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