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Suddenly the dark gave way to light and we entered the central chamber with its twenty
foot high corbelled ceiling and amazingly fresh, warm air. I looked up at the vaulted
ceiling and was filled with terror; the enormous roof-slabs looked precariously balanced
above my head, almost at odds with gravity as they overlapped upwards in a dizzying spiral.
"Don't be a bit frightened, son," said the guide, noticing my pale, terrified face.
"This place has stood the test of time for thousands of years so it's hardly going to
fall down on top of us now."
Thus reassured I let go my mother's hand and wandered around the chamber noticing the
mysterious patterns which decorated the great stone blocks of its walls. With my
fingertips I slowly traced the finely carved triple spiral as the guide explained to a now
enraptured audience the unique importance of Newgrange. He told how our ancestors had
hauled over 200,000 tons of stone and gravel from the river bank a mile away to build
the great monument and then of how they had set ninety seven massive kerbstones carved
with intricate patterns at the foot of the mound. This same ancient people had, with
their forgotten skills, constructed the passageway and the chamber out of four hundred
and fifty huge slabs of rock. In each of the three smaller side chambers they had placed
a shallow stone basin decorated with mysterious solar signs.
"But who was it built this place?" I wondered aloud.
"They'll tell you around here it was the Fairies," said the guide, "Wee little folk who
lived underground after the Gael came to Ireland. But that's all pisheogs and
superstition! This place was the palace of the Dagda and his son Aengus - kings of
the Tuatha De Danann who ruled Ireland long ago. That's what the old books say so I
suppose it was them that built it too. We'll never really know…anyway this was a
palace for the dead not for the living. When they opened it years ago they found the
burnt bones of two people. But that was before my time."
The guide's words had inflamed other imaginations than mine and indeed awoken
the sleeping folk memories that inhabit the heart of every true Irishman. On our
way home from the mysteries of Co. Meath, the man next to us, fortified by a
considerable intake of Arthur Guinness's finest black stout, treated the entire
bus to a passionate, but wildly deranged dissertation on Irish Mythology to which
his appreciative audience made their own irreverent contributions. We finished
our journey to the strains of an enthusiastic but ossified rendition of Count
John McCormack's "The harp that once through Tara's halls…"
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