Newgrange and the Great Stone Circle above the Mist

Gallery Edition: Limited edition of 75 prints in three sizes, printed on fine art heavyweight archival paper.

Newgrange as seen from above on a morning in Autumn, with a veil of mist in the lowlands behind the ridge on which the Neolithic passage tomb sits.

This photograph was taken on a beautiful autumnal morning in 2016, looking north to catch the shadow of Newgrange cast onto the mist behind it. On the front of the passage tomb entrance is the reconstructed quartz wall which gives a good impression of how the monument appeared in the Neolithic. Tonnes of quartz was brought from the Wicklow Mountains to the south, possibly by boat along the coast. Then it was built onto the monument facing, forming a brilliant white revetment on the steep side of the cairn. The quartz was only used at the front of the monument, around the back the revetment was built using ordinary, rounded cairn stones.

Some have questioned if this was how Newgrange had originally looked, or whether a wall built in this way could have stood for any length of time. However, similar near-vertial revetments were common in even older monuments in Brittany, France. The dry-stone vault of the El Romeral dolmen at Antequera in the south of Spain shows just how adept neolithic builders were engineering elaborate structures using small stones of varied shapes and sizes.

Print only on heavyweight fine art cotton rag paper with white border. Sizing relates to paper size.