Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 51

F IG . 4.2 Newgrange before the midwinter sunrise, 18 Dec 2009 (Figs. 4.2,
4.3 , 4.4 , 4.5 , 4.6 , 4.7 , 4.8 , 4.9 , and 4.10 Courtesy of Boyne Valley Tours,
www.newgrange.com)
a thousand years later still. Even the megalithic temples of Malta,
whose building began around 3500 b.c., are a thousand years older
than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
In Ireland and mainland Britain Neolithic settlement seems
to have begun shortly before 4000 b.c., with the building of mega-
lithic tombs starting soon afterwards. The great mound at Knowth
was built about 3300 b.c., Newgrange about 3100 b.c., and Tara
about 3000 b.c. At Newgrange a carved stone, carefully concealed
in the passage wall, is thought to bear the earliest known repre-
sentation of 'The Man in the Moon' [ 6 ] but when the first draft
of this chapter was written, Newgrange was known to be special
for two other reasons. As far as is known, it was the first mega-
lithic site to have an outer ring of standing stones (Fig. 4.2 ), and
it was aligned so that, at its most southerly rising, the midwinter
solstice, the Sun would shine through an opening above the door
and right down the long axis of the tomb (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4 ).
The companion mounds of Knowth and Dowth have similar
entrance passages (Fig. 4.5 ), and they, too, have solstice and equi-
nox alignments (Figs. 4.6 , 4.7 , and 4.8 ), while at Tara, the align-
ment is to the Celtic quarterdays of Samhain and Imbolc (Figs. 4.9
and 4.10 ) - strong support for Thom's postulated pre-Celtic calen-
dar. One of the carved stones at Knowth may be an actual exam-
ple of it [ 3 ]. It never made sense to say that the alignment of the
'window' at Newgrange was coincidental, but when it seemed to