Every year during the winter solstice from December
19-23, at a 5000-year-old
burial
site in County Meath, in the heartland of Ireland a pullucid, winter sun illuminates a secret, inner
chamber. The enormous tomb, one of the most impressive Neolithic burial site in Europe, is over 400ft long and
40ft high, and is decorated with thousands of fist-sized pebbles and large blue-grey slabs of sandstone
carved with Celtic spirals symbolizing the sun.
This place is impressive, and Brú na Bóinne (or Palace of the Boinne) is open to tourists wanting to add a little
Celtic spiritualism to their travels in Ireland. The nearby Visitor Centre explains how all this stuff got here and why
the hunter-gatherers and early farmers who built it bothered to go to all the trouble.