Cross the lawn past the Great Circle and the carved Entrance Stone, go in under the roof-box and up the passage to the cross-shaped chamber under its corbelled roof, and switch on the beam of the midwinter sunrise.
This is the text version of a walkable 3D model: the Guide’s notes for each stop on the walk, with their labels and sources. The 3D walk needs a browser with WebGL.
The Pilgrim's Vestibule
The archive's own room: the portal back to the museum, a Vault object for comparison, and the way out into the Boyne valley.
Newgrange
Newgrange stands on a ridge above a bend of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland. It is a passage tomb: a great round mound, about 80 metres across, ringed by a kerb of large stones, with a passage running in to a stone chamber. It was built about 3200 BCE. With its neighbours Knowth and Dowth it makes up Brú na Bóinne, a World Heritage Site since 1993.
This walk crosses the lawn before the mound, goes in by the passage, and ends in the chamber, where, on the mornings around the winter solstice, the rising sun shines in. Today’s visitors enter only on guided tours from the visitor centre. The plan is modelled after published descriptions at approximate size; the carvings are our own simplified renderings, and the stone is drawn in code.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Brú na Bóinne – Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne” (site 659, inscribed 1993); Heritage Ireland (Office of Public Works), “Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre (Newgrange and Knowth)”; the archive’s Neolithic chapter (ch42).
The Berlin Gold Hat (for comparison)
Neues Museum (Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte), Berlin · Late Bronze Age, c. 1000–800 BCE; bought 1996, find-spot unknown
Not from Newgrange. A tall cone of thin gold covered with stamped circles and crescents, made in the Late Bronze Age, some two thousand years after Newgrange was built, its find-spot unknown. It is shown here because it has been read, like Newgrange, as a way of keeping the sun’s year: one scholar counted its ornament as a calendar of sun and moon. That reading is contested.
Open the Vault entry
I · Before the mound
The lawn before the great mound: the stones of the Great Circle, the kerb and the Entrance Stone, the white quartz wall and the roof-box over the door.
The mound
Layout after published descriptions · positions approximate
The mound is about 80 metres across (figures from 76 to 85 metres are published) and about 12 metres high, and covers some 4,500 square metres. It is built of stones and earth heaped over the passage and chamber. Radiocarbon dates put its building about 3200 BCE.
The front of the mound, with its white wall, is a modern reconstruction. Michael J. O’Kelly excavated here from 1962 to 1975 for the Office of Public Works, and the front was rebuilt after his work.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); WorldHistory.org, “Newgrange”; S. Weadick, “The Winter solstice at Newgrange”, National Museum of Ireland (museum.ie).
The kerb and the Entrance Stone
Carvings: our own rendering, simplified Model convenience, not the real site
Round the foot of the mound runs a kerb of 97 long stones laid end to end; none weighs under a tonne. Many are carved. The finest is the one lying across the entrance, Kerbstone 1 or the Entrance Stone, about 3 metres long and 1.2 metres high, covered with spirals, lozenges and wavy lines. Its partner in quality, Kerbstone 52, lies on the far side of the mound, opposite the entrance.
Visitors today go over the Entrance Stone by modern steps. The model leaves out the kerbstone beside it instead, so you can walk round.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); WorldHistory.org, “Newgrange”; knowth.com, “Newgrange: the chamber”; Wikipedia, “Newgrange” (a pointer only, to be checked against the excavation report).
The white wall
Contested
Before the entrance O’Kelly found a spread of white quartz, which comes from the Wicklow mountains to the south, and rounded dark stones. He judged that they had fallen from a wall on the front of the mound, and the wall you see was rebuilt on that reading, held up with concrete. O’Kelly himself called his account of how the mound and its facing were built ‘a guess’.
Other archaeologists disagree. George Eogan, who excavated nearby Knowth, has argued that such a wall would not have stood without concrete support, and that the quartz lay in some other way. The reconstruction is still argued over.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); WorldHistory.org, “Newgrange”; A. Marshall, knowth.com, on the excavation and reconstruction of Newgrange.
The roof-box
Not supported by the evidence
Above the doorway is a second, smaller opening: the roof-box. It is this, not the door, that lets the midwinter sun into the tomb. The floor of the passage climbs about two metres to the chamber, and the roof-box is set higher than the door; our reading, not the sources’, is that this is what lets the beam reach the chamber.
In 2016 a writer claimed the roof-box was invented by the restorers. The Office of Public Works replied with photographs from the early 20th century, one of them taken in 1935, that show it in place before the excavation.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: T. P. Ray, “The winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange, Ireland: accident or design?”, Nature 337 (1989), 343–345 (read as reproduced at newgrange.com); “Shedding light on winter solstice at Newgrange”, The Irish Times (19 December 2013); K. Williams, “Raising the Roof: Comments on the recent Newgrange ‘roof-box’ controversy”, ShadowsandStone blog (27 December 2016), with the Office of Public Works photograph of 1935; Wikipedia, “Newgrange” (a pointer only, to be checked against the excavation report).
The Great Circle
Contested Layout after published descriptions · positions approximate
Standing stones ring the mound at a distance. Twelve survive of a circle that may once have held about 38. They are usually taken to be later than the mound, put up in the Early Bronze Age, but how much later, and whether they belong with the tomb at all, is debated.
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); Wikipedia, “Newgrange” (a pointer only, to be checked against the excavation report).
Brú na Bóinne
Newgrange is one of three great passage tombs on this bend of the Boyne, with Knowth and Dowth, among some forty smaller ones. UNESCO calls the group the largest concentration of megalithic art in Europe.
The landscape still holds surprises. In the dry summer of 2018 Anthony Murphy and Ken Williams, flying drones, saw the outline of a large henge, a round enclosure about 150 metres across with stretches of double ditch, marked in the parched crops near Newgrange. It had not been known before.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Brú na Bóinne – Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne” (site 659, inscribed 1993); Smithsonian Magazine, “Drought reveals giant 4,500-year-old Irish henge” (16 July 2018).
After the builders
The tomb was not forgotten. Roman coins of the early fourth century CE and gold jewellery were left at the mound; some are now in the National Museum of Ireland and the British Museum. In 1699 workmen digging stone for the landowner, Charles Campbell, found the entrance, and the antiquary Edward Lhwyd came to see and describe the passage and chamber. It has been open since.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: Wikipedia, “Newgrange” (a pointer only, to be checked against the excavation report); WorldHistory.org, “Newgrange”.
The house of the Dagda
What was believed, not a finding
Medieval Irish tales call this place the Brug of the Boyne and make it the home of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythological race of gods. It is the dwelling of the Dagda, their chief god, and of his son Aengus, child of Boann, the river’s goddess. The tales say what later people believed of the mound; they are not a record of its builders.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: S. Weadick, “The Winter solstice at Newgrange”, National Museum of Ireland (museum.ie); WorldHistory.org, “Newgrange”.
II · The passage
Nearly nineteen metres of passage between upright slabs, its floor climbing two metres towards the chamber.
The passage
Layout after published descriptions · positions approximate Model convenience: passage height
The passage is just under 19 metres long, lined on each side with upright slabs. Its floor climbs about two metres from the door to the chamber.
The real passage is low and narrow. The model keeps it a little higher so you can walk it upright, and draws it straight.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); “Shedding light on winter solstice at Newgrange”, The Irish Times (19 December 2013); Heritage Ireland (Office of Public Works), “Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre (Newgrange and Knowth)”; Wikipedia, “Newgrange” (a pointer only, to be checked against the excavation report).
The midwinter sunrise
Beam drawn by us · its width, fall and timing approximate
On the mornings around 21 December, if the sky is clear, the rising sun shines through the roof-box, along the passage and onto the chamber floor. The light comes in just before nine o’clock and lasts about seventeen minutes, for a few days around the solstice (about 19 to 23 December).
O’Kelly saw it on 21 December 1967, the first recorded modern sighting. Was it planned? In 1989 the astronomer Tom Ray measured the alignment and concluded that the evidence supports a deliberate orientation, though he called that evidence weak. Each year a lottery picks the few people who wait in the chamber for it.
Switch it on here: the lamps go down and the beam creeps up the passage, lies along the chamber floor as far as it reaches today, then withdraws, its seventeen minutes compressed into sixteen seconds and repeating. The dashed line shows the further reach Ray calculated for the time of building.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: “Shedding light on winter solstice at Newgrange”, The Irish Times (19 December 2013); S. Weadick, “The Winter solstice at Newgrange”, National Museum of Ireland (museum.ie); T. P. Ray, “The winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange, Ireland: accident or design?”, Nature 337 (1989), 343–345 (read as reproduced at newgrange.com); Wikipedia, “Newgrange” (a pointer only, to be checked against the excavation report).
III · The chamber
The cross-shaped chamber under its corbelled roof: three recesses, their stone basins, and the carved stones, among them the triple spiral.
The chamber and its roof
Layout after published descriptions · positions approximate
The chamber is cross-shaped: a central space with three small recesses opening off it, to the right, the left and ahead. Above you the roof is corbelled: course upon course of flat stones, each set a little further in than the one below, closing nearly six metres up under a single capstone. It has kept the chamber dry for some five thousand years.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); knowth.com, “Newgrange: the chamber”.
The triple spiral
Carvings: our own rendering, simplified Meaning unknown
On a stone of the back recess is the most famous carving at Newgrange: three spirals joined together, about 30 by 28 centimetres. Nobody knows what it meant to its makers. Modern readings (the sun, the cycle of life, death and rebirth, a triple goddess) are guesses that no evidence can test.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: knowth.com, “Newgrange: the chamber”; World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage).
Basins and carvings
Carvings: our own rendering, simplified Layout after published descriptions · positions approximate
Each recess held a large stone basin. The stones of the east recess, to your right as you come in, are carved with spirals, lozenges and zigzags; those of the west recess with circles inside circles. The carvings in the model are our own, in the manner of the motifs, not tracings of any stone.
Sources: knowth.com, “Newgrange: the chamber”.
The dead
Human remains: described, not shown
The excavators found the remains of at least five people in the chamber, most of them cremated, in and near the basins, with beads, pendants and small stone balls, now in the National Museum of Ireland. The chamber had stood open since 1699, so, we infer, the number once laid here cannot be known from what survived.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: World Heritage Ireland, “Newgrange” (worldheritageireland.ie, Brú na Bóinne: built heritage); S. Weadick, “The Winter solstice at Newgrange”, National Museum of Ireland (museum.ie); WorldHistory.org, “Newgrange”.
Where the light falls
Sources differ
Tom Ray found that when the tomb was built the beam reached further than it does now, into the back recess, lighting the triple spiral there indirectly. Because the tilt of the earth’s axis has changed since, the beam today is a metre or two shorter and barely reaches the back of the chamber. The National Museum of Ireland describes the light as reaching the spiral today. The two accounts differ; the model, like the archive’s own chapter, follows Ray.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: T. P. Ray, “The winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange, Ireland: accident or design?”, Nature 337 (1989), 343–345 (read as reproduced at newgrange.com); “Shedding light on winter solstice at Newgrange”, The Irish Times (19 December 2013); S. Weadick, “The Winter solstice at Newgrange”, National Museum of Ireland (museum.ie); the archive’s Neolithic chapter (ch42).
A king of Newgrange?
Contested Human remains: described, not shown
In 2020 a team of geneticists and archaeologists (Cassidy, Bradley and colleagues) read ancient DNA from Irish passage tombs. From a fragment of skull bone found in this chamber they reported a man whose parents were first-degree relatives, brother and sister or parent and child. They took this, with an eleventh-century tale of a builder-king who slept with his sister to restart the sun, as a sign of a ruling dynasty; Dowth’s old name, Fertae Chuile, means ‘hill of sin’.
In 2025 Smyth, Carlin and colleagues re-examined the fragment, dated it to 3340–3020 BCE, and argued that ‘a one-off example of incest is a shaky foundation on which to reconstruct an elite’. The question is open.
Read the Neolithic chapter
Sources: L. M. Cassidy, D. G. Bradley and others, “A dynastic elite in monumental Neolithic society”, Nature 582 (2020), doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2378-6; Queen’s University Belfast and research.ie reports (2020); J. Smyth, N. Carlin and others, “King of Newgrange: a critical analysis of a Neolithic petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber”, Antiquity 99 (2025), 672–688, as reported by University College Dublin (24 June 2025).