Drogheda... rhymes with "broader"

Our first excursion out of Dublin and into the Irish countryside was to Drogheda. Like most Irish words, only half the letters have any impact on how it sounds.

We caught the train up on Saturday afternoon, dropped into a local pub (signposted as Matthews, but known locally as McPhails for some reason), and dined well at the hotel restaurant - "The d hotel". We had a great view of the town from the hotel balcony.

Drogheda and the nearby Boyne valley is absolutely full of history medieval ruins and more recent churches.  In 1649 Oliver Cromwell slaughtered most of the town, including 200 men who had surrendered. In 1690 the Battle of the Boyne took place just up the river, where Catholic King James II and Protestant King William III (aka William of Orange) faced off. William won, and thus began the Orange Order which continues to be a controversial force in Ireland.


But a few thousand years before that, stone-age Irish were busy further up the Boyne, building strange mounds. And that's what we were there to see. A short taxi-ride out of town is the ironically (it's 5000 years old) Newgrange, which is essentially a large mound of stones and dirt with a tunnel in it.

The photo above is of the entrance to the tunnel. It heads in about 20m and up about 2m to a point where the stone-age folk scattered the remains of their dead. The stone in front of the entrance is engraved with the triple spiral which was an important symbol of the day. The rest of the exterior (the little white stones) is reconstructed from material found on the site, but the tunnel and mound are all original.


The really clever bit of this whole arrangement occurs on the morning of the winter solstice, when the sun rises (yes, even in Ireland) and shines through the box above the entrance way. It illuminates the tunnel for around 17 minutes before returning it to complete darkness.


The countryside around Newgrange is picture perfect Ireland. We headed back into town and swung by the church where St Oliver Plunkett's severed head (he was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason) is on display, before catching the train back to Dublin.


We missed a lot of the Droghedian (a word?) sights, so we'll definitely be going back there a some stage to check out the things we missed.