Aug 7, 2019
Image: Newgrange illustration - World Heritage Ireland/Public Domain
During the summer of 2018 Ireland was subjected to unusually severe weather conditions according to absolutehistory.com. While the island typically experiences moderate temperatures and lots of rain, this particular Irish summer brought about drought. And though this was undoubtedly a huge worry for the country’s farmers, historians were conversely treated to something special.
On July 10 of that year, Anthony Murphy and Ken Williams sent their drones hovering over Brú na Bóinne in the country’s east. This historic area is home to some spectacular ancient monuments, the most famous of which is Newgrange. Indeed, owing to its historical significance, UNESCO designated the Brú na Bóinne region as a World Heritage Site in 1993.
Today, evidence of Brú na Bóinne’s past significance can be seen in the remains of tombs, stoneworks and henges. A henge is a sort of ancient modification to the land consisting of a circular bank and a trench. These ditches were dug out within the earth berm, suggesting that they weren’t created for protective purposes.
People are thought to have inhabited Brú na Bóinne for no fewer than 6,000 years, and perhaps even longer. However, the constructions which can be seen today are thought to have been erected about 1,000 years later than this. This would mean that their origins date back to the Neolithic era of Irish history.
The Neolithic era is best characterized as the concluding stages of the Stone Age. In Ireland, this period is said to have lasted from 4,000 B.C. up until around 2,500 B.C.. It’s thought that farming practices first started to develop on the island during this time.
Some of the Neolithic constructions found in Brú na Bóinne date as far back as the 35th century B.C.. This, in fact, actually makes them older than even the pyramids of ancient Egypt. And just like the pyramids, these Irish monuments demonstrate that the people who built them had a sophisticated grasp of mathematics.
The clearest indication of this mathematical ability is perhaps seen at the Newgrange monument. Newgrange is an elaborate tomb, comprising of a broadly circular structure enclosing around an acre of land. Its main features are a central alley lined with stone which leads into a series of underground rooms.
During the annual winter solstice, beams of sunlight travel through a passage in Newgrange to light up its interior. Nowadays, this event occurs some four minutes after the sun appears over the horizon. However, experts have calculated that the beams of sunlight would have shone into the shaft precisely at sunrise when the monument was first built.
This indicates that the people who designed Newgrange had quite an astute understanding of astronomy and math. But on top of that, the site is also indicative of a people who nurtured their artistic instincts, too. Indeed, Newgrange is home to a variety of stone carvings shaped in a number of different patterns.
In addition to Newgrange, Brú na Bóinne is also home to the Neolithic monuments known as Dowth and Knowth. Like Newgrange, these sites were seemingly designed with sophisticated astronomical factors in mind. And today they are also noted for the works of art which can be found within their structures.
In fact, the Brú na Bóinne region as whole is an important site of Neolithic art. After all, it’s said to possess one of the most extensive collections of Western European prehistoric stone art. And this shouldn’t be surprising, given that around 90 other monuments are in the area besides Newgrange, Dowth and Knowth.
Thanks to the ample evidence of its rich history, Brú na Bóinne has been a focus of contemporary archaeological works since 1960. Indeed, that was the year that a tomb within an area known as Townleyhall was first investigated. Though a relatively modest construction, this monument nonetheless seemingly sparked a great deal more archaeological interest in the region.
Over the subsequent decades, a series of additional archaeological probes were undertaken throughout Brú na Bóinne. Consequently, numerous discoveries have been recorded and historians have attempted to make sense of them all. And in more recent times, the works have been extended to even the edges of the region.
Brú na Bóinne has already painted a picture for historians of what life in Neolithic Ireland was once like. But there are nonetheless still aspects of the society which remain obscure, meaning that further study will be necessary to improve our comprehension of how life was back then. And any new discoveries cannot but help in this regard.
Anthony Murphy is a journalist with a keen interest in the Brú na Bóinne area. In fact, such is his passion for the region’s history that he frequently sends a drone up into the skies above it. In doing so, Murphy hopes to observe something new which might reveal more of the past.
But during July 2018 Murphy felt particularly compelled to investigate the lands of Brú na Bóinne. At the time, Ireland and the neighboring British mainland were experiencing unusually hot weather and low rainfall. Plant growth was suffering under these harsh conditions – but with one consequent benefit.
Hot and dry weather conditions are actually extremely conducive to allowing so-called crop marks to stand out. Visible from above, crop marks are lines or patterns in the ground which indicate a construction buried beneath. As archaeologist Louise Barker explained to Wired magazine in 2018, “It’s like a painting that comes out into the fieldscapes.”
Certain prehistoric constructions – such as henges – would have been defined by man-made channels dug into the ground. Of course, as the centuries passed, these would have been filled in. Yet underneath the surface level, some of these trenches retain extra nutrients and moisture upon which plant life depends.
In extremely hot and arid conditions, plants will take their necessary nutrients from deeper underground than usual. Therefore, those that are positioned above nutrient-rich trenches will grow better than those that are not. These plants will stay healthier and more verdant, whereas the others will wilt and wither.
That is exactly what happened in the U.K. during the summer of 2018. In an area called Langstone in southern Wales, an ancient farm was revealed by crop marks in the ground. And though it wasn’t initially clear from what precise era this farm derived, the find was nonetheless significant.
Archaeologist Louise Barker was thrilled by the discovery. “We’re seeing new things with all of these crop marks,” she told Wired in the wake of the find. “We probably haven’t seen anything like this since the 1970s, the last time there was a really, really dry summer like this.”
Anthony Murphy had caught wind of new archaeological finds in Britain and the news obviously stuck with him. In fact, he reasoned that the heatwave engulfing Ireland might too reveal interesting etchings in the ground. So over the course of a couple days, he sent his drone over Brú na Bóinne.
"I was flying my drone over the Boyne Valley, as I do on regular occasions,” Murphy later wrote on his website Mythical Ireland. “I had it in the back of my mind that some previously unrecorded archaeological sites had been revealed due to the drought conditions in Britain. I hadn’t the faintest expectation that I would find anything new.”
On July 9, 2018, Murphy sent his drone up to the sky in order to survey the ground below. Yet by the end of this relatively short flight, he would have little to show for his efforts beyond a small number of photographs. His aerial survey had discovered little of particular interest on this occasion.
Yet Murphy’s instincts told him that he needed to try again. “Something was nagging at me [the day after the first attempt],” he wrote on his website. “My own thoughts were niggling at me. ‘I will have to go out and fly again tonight,’ I said to myself. Gut feelings and all that. I knew it was important.”
So on July 10, Murphy prepared to send his drone skyward once again. But just before he could actually do so, his friend Ken Williams suddenly showed up. Williams had actually been photographing Newgrange using his own drone. And so with this in mind, the two men decided to work together.
Murphy was first to send up his drone, with Williams following suit shortly after. The two drones were fixed above a location with a series of intriguing features – but nothing earth-shattering. After some time, the power in Murphy’s drone began to fade and so he landed it to swap batteries.
With the drone ready to go once again, Murphy decided to send it towards a different area than before. And as he directed his airborne device in this particular direction, he noticed something strange. On the ground beneath his drone, there appeared to be a circle etched into the ground.
Intrigued, Murphy lowered the altitude of his drone in order to get a better view of the ground below. And soon, a series of other circles aside from the one initially sighted came into focus. This time, it transpired that Murphy’s drone had caught sight of something truly significant.
Murphy alerted Williams to his find and so the latter sent over his own drone. Careful not to crash their devices into one another, the two men set their drones to hover above the site. They spent up to 15 minutes snapping photographs – and soon they were noting some additional details.
"Immediately to the west of the new henge was what appeared to be another large enclosure,” Murphy later recalled on his website. “And in the far northeast of the field some more circles. And close to the lake and trees, just to the north of them, a mottled landscape of dark and bright features.”
The two men were aware that they had managed to capture images of something significant. So they grounded their drones and quickly sent out the photos of the markings to the archaeological community. And these people, in turn, appeared to be just as enthusiastic about the discovery as Murphy and Williams were themselves.
Steve Davis, an archaeologist from University College Dublin, has implied that the find is potentially momentous. “This is internationally significant and we now need to figure out what it means,” he told the BBC in July 2018. “It has some characteristics that we’ve never seen before. For example, the very odd double ditch sections that make up its circumference.”
"It’s one of a series of large monuments near Newgrange,” Davis continued. “We don’t know what the henges are for but it’s thought they were meeting places. The confusing thing is why there are so many in one area. Nowhere else in the world has so many in one spot.”
Another archaeologist by the name of Dr. Geraldine Stout has expressed her own thoughts on the question to website Independent.ie. In July 2018 she commented, “I think there was a whole series of facilities built for the pilgrims coming to Newgrange in prehistory. Generally we believe these henge monuments were built up to 500 years after the main use of Newgrange.”
According to World Heritage Ireland, the warm conditions of summer 2018 also brought about further discoveries. Indeed, the crop marks noted by Murphy and Williams were not, apparently, the only ones to be recorded. In fact, Ireland’s National Monuments Service actually decided to conduct a survey of its own from above Brú na Bóinne.
The pictures taken as part of this National Monuments Service search revealed features that had formerly been missed. And on top of these new finds, some added details were acquired relating to established sites across Brú na Bóinne. So all in all, it seems that the otherwise severe Irish climate conditions of 2018 were something of an archaeological blessing.
Indeed, the plethora of visual data gathered during the prolonged dry spell seems set to keep the experts at the National Monuments Service busy with analysis for years to come. Already, the new aerial images of Brú na Bóinne have proved essential in identifying new features in the area and gleaning fresh insights. There are, of course, still questions regarding the region and its history, but things might now prove a little clearer.
As for Anthony Murphy, he has been left thrilled by his and Ken Williams’ discovery. Yet the rarity of such a find has not been lost on him. “In all honesty, it’s going to take some time to process this,” he wrote on his website. “Archaeologists are calling it a once-in-a-lifetime find.”
"Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be involved in a revelation of this magnitude, in the Boyne Valley,” Murphy enthused. “Right there in the UNESCO World Heritage Site that has been under so much scrutiny from archaeologists for decades. Never in a million years would I have even thought it possible.”
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