Opinion

Jarlath Kearney: Newgrange can teach us much about the pursuit of dreams

Newgrange in Co Meath
Newgrange in Co Meath Newgrange in Co Meath

Live coverage of Thursday’s winter solstice was streaming through the internet on my iPad from 80-odd miles away. The bilingual production was good, well-informed and interesting.

Unfortunately the morning sky in Meath was overcast. So the spectacle of the passage tomb’s central chamber being filled with sunlight from the solstice dawn wouldn’t happen.

In any event, I hadn’t even waited that long to turn off the coverage. I wasn’t sure about the concept, the whole idea, the virtual connection, including my role as a viewer. So I stepped back to morning silence.

Newgrange is a cathedral of stone engineering and pre-Christian spiritual wisdom, aligning the insights of ancient concelebration with the mysteries of creation in our universe.

Ireland’s Boyne Valley monuments are older and - given their scale, location and context - arguably more impressive than the great pyramids of Giza.

Our nation’s Celtic heritage flows through the Bann and the Boyne, from places like An Grianán in Donegal to Slieve Gullion in South Armagh and far beyond, in scatterings of historical hotspots that still shine with simple unspoiled magic. It’s quite remarkable in this century.

These are places where talk of healing wells and fairy thorns still elicits well-deserved and well-grounded local reverence; where passage tombs and ringforts still stand alongside dolmens and holestones as symbolic portals of connection to other realms.

They are statements of meaning from an ancient past where the honesty of loyalties and loves became the arbiters of survival and success for ruling clanns and their communities.

And so back to last Thursday morning.

There was something ill-fitting and displaced – even uncomfortable - about using a wireless internet on a portable computer to remotely engage with nature’s annual sunlight coronation of a 5,000 year-old temple constructed for the deities and the dead of ancient Ireland.

It just didn’t feel right to mark the turning of another year’s cycle through the pixels of a Silicon Valley tablet.

The whole beauty of Newgrange – like so much of Ireland’s complex and interwoven cultural heritage (especially Celtic and Christian) – comes from the incredible privilege of being present on the landscapes of our ancestors’ dreams, both physical and spiritual. It comes from standing in the footsteps of the great dreamers and the holy people, the bright star-watchers and their expert stonebuilders, the artists and the seanchaí.

It is a binary code of connection and memory that digital technology could never capture. For it emerges only at the deepest levels of sentience and spirituality within each of us, as individuals. It simply can’t be programmed.

In the silence I then began to recall my visit to Newgrange a few days before last winter’s solstice, in 2016.

An early Saturday morning with cold fog hugging the Boyne, and bulbous clouds of breath. Damp dew coating the hedge-hugged cobwebs with diamonds of dripping, sparkling light. Thick grass plunged by the random tracks of journeyed footsteps. The sense of dignity entering the passage tomb’s central chamber. The sense of awe that this structure doesn’t leak rainwater – even after 5,000 years.

And then outside, strolling the perimeter and noticing a flickered movement among the foothold stones of the monument. Standing for around ten minutes watching a tiny mouse dart in and out, scampering for scraps. And bemused how the tourists casually passing with their shuttering cameras and chattering conversation could miss this fantastic little creature, this survivor, that uniquely calls Newgrange its home.

The creators of our ancient cathedrals and traditions and tombs of heritage, history and faith, could never have imagined the changes that would befall the world as they knew – even a thousand years ago.

Yet their societies were organised in ways that created monuments to the majesty of this planet, monuments which still stand as gathering places of annual goodness, where the dead are still remembered and the living still celebrate, Celtic and Christian traditions often threaded side by side. And where the legacy of ancient dreamers still holds secrets that we may never fully unravel – despite so-called modernisation.

As we each enter 2018, there’s much to learn from the secrets of solitude and silence buried in the heart of places like Newgrange – legacies that would never have been built if cynics or sceptics had their negative ways.

History is screaming out at our generation for new hope from those who will dare to become tomorrow’s great dreamers and stone builders, and artists and holy people and star-watchers, the creators of connection and memory for new ways to savour - and save - our beautiful, imperilled planet.

So what dream will you build, and what legacy will you leave?