Newgrange has become part of a ‘performance’ infusing the mound with intangible heritage: on the shortest day of the year, 21st December, many are drawn to Newgrange to be part of the winter solstice spectacle. The number of people allowed into the chamber to witness the rising sun illuminating the passage and chamber is limited, with most places gained through an annual draw. The event is widely reported in the media, and the potential weather conditions monitored for several days prior: a cloudy sky would prevent the event from occurring. Reporting for RTÉ in 2010, Dowling, referencing Ireland’s severe economic downturn, noted the success of that year’s event depended ‘on the sun gods and whether they want to shine on us … 21st December 2010 was not one of those days’. However, the solar alignment was only rediscovered during O’Kelly’s excavations in 1963.
In 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage defined ‘intangible cultural heritage’ as:
The practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This
90 intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.
The Convention identified the manifestation of such heritage in ‘oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; performing arts; social practices, rituals and festive events;
knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and traditional craftsmanship’. December 21st and Newgrange has become an annual ritual act, part of the mound’s intangible heritage. But, it can be recognised that the custom of awaiting the sunrise has not been ‘transmitted from generation to generation’: this ritual is less than fifty years old, and those who go to Newgrange to celebrate the light entering the chamber are inventing ceremonies around it: the form of celebration is just as conjectural as the mound’s physical reconstruction.
In 2011 Scotland hosted The Gathering, a yearlong event during which the diaspora were summoned back to celebrate their place of origin. In 2013 Ireland is hosting The Gathering, a ‘year of welcomes’, where ‘Ireland will open its arms to friends and family from all over the world, inviting them home to locally organised gatherings in villages, towns and cities’. Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has cynically described it as a shakedown of American tourists during difficult economic times (Condit, 2012). The motif of The Gathering draws on the triple spiral petroglyphic art found on one of the orthostats in Newgrange’s chamber, but the stylisation of the spirals as fireworks hones in the celebratory nature of The Gathering. This places Newgrange, and thus Ireland’s archaeological past, at the centre of Irishness for the diaspora, and Cochrane recognises the power of Newgrange’s petroglyphic art which is
‘perceived to be ‘authentic’ (2006, p. 256).
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett feels that ‘the arts festival may have become the safe and appropriate place to be different, to be “ethnic”. As such, these festivals have long been the repository of imagined communities and invented traditions’ (1998, p. 242). The Gathering could also be deemed to be a
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‘performance’, a festival whereby it is ‘safe’ to be Irish through a legitimisation of Irish identity both at home and abroad. Urry (1990) refers to the external assessment and enjoyment of culture as the ‘tourist gaze’. However, it can be argued that when inverted this becomes a ‘performance’: manufactured
‘intangible heritage’.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett considers ethnography and performance where the minority group ‘perform themselves, whether at home to tourists or at world’s fairs, homelands entertainments, or folklife festivals – when they become living signs of themselves’ (1998, p. 18). The ritual nature of the winter solstice at Newgrange can be interpreted as underpinning the narrative of the
‘natives’ which embodies possession of the material remains. This will also be considered later through the mass protests held at the Hill of Tara during the M3 motorway construction, widely condemned by protestors as state sponsored destruction: vandalism ‘from above’.
2.5 Knowth
The Knowth tomb complex is located near Newgrange, in the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site. It is classed a National Monument, and dates to the Neolithic Era, 3300-2900 BCE, being contemporaneous with Newgrange.
Professor George Eogan, University College Dublin, was the chief excavator of Knowth. He cited the pre-excavation measurements at: 9.9m in height, 80m in diameter (east-west) and 95m in diameter (north-south) (1986).
Detailed excavation at Knowth significantly reduced the ground level, revealing not only more of the principal mound, but seventeen other satellite tombs. The main tomb covers an area of 1.5 acres. Many of the Knowth tombs have kerbstones, 250 of which exhibit megalithic art. During excavation Eogan found the main section of the mound to be stratified with complex layers of loose stone, boulder clay and shale (1986). Unlike Newgrange, the presence of a tomb in the great mound of Knowth was only conjecture. In 1967 the western tomb was discovered; in 1968 the eastern tomb was uncovered, lying back to back with the western tomb. These are of a similar construction to the chamber and passage at Newgrange.
Eogan notes that Europe has nine hundred stones with recorded megalithic art located in fifty passage tombs or related sites. Four hundred of these are
92 found in Brú na Bóinne. Therefore, the Knowth cemetery contains ‘more than a quarter of the known megalithic art from all other areas of Europe, including Ireland…and has about 45% of the total known megalithic art from all Irish passage tombs’ (1986, p. 169). The principal mound at Knowth was subject to periods of human activity: during the Iron Age a ditch was dug inside the kerb; seven Early Christian souterrains (storage or refuge features) had been constructed; in the Medieval period a grange or settlement was built on top of the mound, the remains of which were uncovered during excavation. Later a modern ditch, a field boundary, bisected the mound (Eogan, 1986).