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hunter-gathering was gradual and piecemeal and did not necessarily involve sharp changes in the
make-up of the Irish population.
These signals of the arrival of the Neolithic in Ireland are small and subtle, noticed only by the
professional archaeologist. How different, then, from the gigantic stone structures that also
appeared in Ireland 1,000 years later. These are the jewels of Irish archaeology, drawing tens of
thousands of visitors each year to stand in awe and reflect on the grandeur, the construction and the
purpose of these magnificent structures. The Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe has studied
megalithic structures in the Isles and also in Brittany and along the Atlantic coast of France and
Iberia. Rather than a phenomenon solely linked to the Neolithic and the spread of farming, Cunliffe
traces their origin to the shell middens of Mesolithic Portugal. Within the piles of shells
accumulated over centuries on the banks of the River Sado, excavations have found human remains
that have all the appearance of being deliberate ritual burials. The middens are enormous, some
over 100 metres in diameter and several metres high, and within some of them over 100 burials
have been discovered. Further north, on the southern coast of Brittany, later dated midden graves
have been found lined with stone. In others, bodies were buried with personal ornaments such as
drilled sea shells and stone pendants. Traces of red ochre show that, like the Red Lady of Paviland,
the bodies were covered in this pigment, the purpose of which may perhaps have been to restore
the flush of health to a lifeless corpse.
Barry Cunliffe sees a natural progression from these shell-midden graves to the two earliest
styles of Neolithic monumental architecture: the long barrow, where soil has taken the place of
shells, and the passage graves. And it is the passage graves of the Boyne valley in Ireland that
visitors flock to see. Although there are over 230 passage graves in Ireland, it is the tombs at
Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange that, deservedly, command the most attention. All three are roughly
the same size, 85 metres in diameter and 11 metres high. These dimensions may be similar to the
shell middens which provided the archetypal design, but the effort put into their construction was
phenomenal. The stone-lined passage and the tomb that lies at its end involved the quarrying,
transportation and setting in place of over fifty giant stone slabs, some weighing more than 5 tons.
Once the tomb was in place, the whole structure was covered in the gigantic mound, which is made
up of more than 200,000 tons of rocks and earth.
At Newgrange, the narrow passage which leads to the tomb itself is 25 metres long. It was
aligned in such a way that the light of the rising sun at the midwinter solstice shone directly along
the passage on to an intricately carved triple spiral motif on the opposite wall of the central tomb.
The Knowth mound, about a kilometre to the north-west, contains not one but two passage graves,
as does the Dowth mound to the east of Newgrange. Around these massive tombs are other smaller
tombs and numerous standing stones. Carbon-dates of organic remains found buried within the
mound date the construction of Newgrange at about 5,000 years ago, well after the dates for
Ireland’s first unambiguously Neolithic site at Ballynagilly in Ulster.
It is only natural to imagine that these gigantic structures, and the complex and mysterious
social rituals which their presence suggests, must have been brought about by a wave of new
arrivals to Ireland. Yet the clear link to similar, even if not identical, structures along the entire
Atlantic coastline, coupled with the early genesis of these structures in the middens of the
Mesolithic, could equally well mean that these impressive megaliths are actually one step along the
path of a continuous development of monumental architecture along the entire Atlantic fringe from