Knowth

Knowth is arguably one of the most interesting historical sites in the whole of Co. Meath, if not the whole of Leinster, because there has been human activity there for no less than 6,000 years. At various stages, people have been using this site as a place to live, a place to bury their dead, a place to work, and more than likely, a place for ceremonies and festivals, since 4,000 BC. The history of Knowth is far more complex than the history of its more famous and more popular sister tomb, Newgrange, because for thousands of years after it ceased to be used solely as a place of burial and ritual, Knowth lived on as a place of settlement, and as a centre of political and military power.

The earliest evidence for settlement here dates back as far as 4000BC. These are the remains of a rectangular house made of wood and wattle which probably had a roof of thatch. But the most significant phase of Knowth's history came a thousand years later when the tombs themselves were built, and these are the mounds which you can see today.

This complex of 18 passage graves is part of a much larger complex, known as 'The Boyne Cemetery' which covers an area of ten square kilometres (approximately 6 sq. miles) and is made up of 40 passage graves in total. Thirty seven of these are quite small like the smaller ones here, but three are very large: Newgrange, which is the most famous, Dowth which is closed to the public because it has not been excavated yet, and Knowth which is the largest in the whole cemetery. All the tombs are located in an area of land bordered on three sides by the River Boyne. As the Boyne flows from West to East, it loops to the south and it was inside this loop that the tombs were built, five thousand years ago in the Neolithic, or the New Stone Age. Perhaps the builders of the tombs believed that the sacred River Boyne would protect the cemetery in this way. Because they were built around 3000BC, they are 1000 years older than Stonehenge in England, and 500 years older than the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

The Neolithic, or New Stone Age people who built the tombs, were Ireland's first farmers. They settled along the banks of the Boyne about 6000 years ago, they cleared away the trees so they could grow crops such as wheat and barley in the fertile soil, and they kept animals as well like cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, much as the farmers around here are still doing today all these thousands of years later.

You don't normally consider Stone Age people to be all that intelligent, advanced technologically, or even well organised socially, but obviously these New Stone Age people were highly advanced, highly skilled engineers and astronomers, who were very well organised and extremely dedicated to their spiritual beliefs and to the spirits of their dead.

Because they left no written records however, we know very little about them for sure, but we can say that this community of about 1200 people must have been well settled and living in relative peace, because it would have taken centuries to build all the tombs around here: the three main tombs alone probably took around 50 years each to build, and remember there are 37 smaller ones in the Boyne Cemetery. We don't know how their society was organised: maybe they had leaders like kings or queens, or maybe they worked perfectly well together without them. Maybe men dominated; maybe women, or perhaps they were equal too. Maybe people were employed to build the tombs, while the others farmed the land to support the tribe; or maybe they worked in shifts. Some suggest, as they do when talking about the pyramids in Egypt, that slave labour was used to build the tombs for a powerful family. We have no way of knowing for certain, but personally, I prefer to think that everyone was pulling together in the common hope of a better life after death; they shed blood, sweat and tears for what they believed in, and more than simply being a place to bury their dead, the Knowth complex of tombs, like Newgrange, was a centre of ceremony and festivity. They were more than just tombs: they were places where the spirits of the ancestors would live on forever, and they represented the hopes of the people who worked harder to build them than we can ever imagine, and they were a constant, spectacular reminder of the promise of life after death. But, as I have already said, nobody can say for certain what these people believed, how they lived, or what the tombs really meant to them. We can only speculate.

The next main period in Ireland's history was the Bronze Age, so called because people had advanced beyond stone as the main material for jewellery and tools and onto metal. There is very little evidence of activity here at Knowth during this period however. The gap is hard to explain — perhaps there was migration out of this area; perhaps some kind of plague killed the people off; or maybe the site was so respected as a sacred place, it was simply left alone.

The one piece of evidence which we do have from this period however is very important. The early Bronze Age people were known as the 'Beaker People' because of the style of pottery they used. In Ireland, this pottery was almost entirely used for domestic purposes, i.e. in the home, while on the Continent, they often used the pottery in association with burial. But here at Knowth, a Beaker burial was found: a Beaker pot was discovered next to some cremated human remains, and this is the only Beaker burial found in Ireland to date.

The second major phase in the history of Knowth itself came in the Iron Age, over 3,000 years after the tombs were built. By this time the Roman Empire was at its height in Europe. The Romans never actually came to Ireland, but the Celts did, probably from Iberia which is the large peninsula where modern Spain and Portugal is situated. The Celts built a settlement here at Knowth, with an enclosure on top for the local chieftain. From there, he could see for miles around, and so be warned of any threat from rivals, and his house was protected by two concentric ditches and banks which were dug into the main mound. These ditches shortened the passages leading into the tombs by 4m ( about 12 feet ) and destroyed the entrances, so we will never know what they really looked like. And we know that the Celts also entered the tomb because Celtic graffiti in the form of Ogham writing was discovered inside the passages. One good thing to come from what they did was that by piling the stones and soil from the dug-out ditches on top of the kerbstones around the base of the mound, they protected them and the beautiful artwork on them, so that 5000 years later, only 3 of the 127 kerbstones are missing.

The Celts brought with them their own culture and beliefs of course, and they also brought a different style of burial — Inhumation. In other words, they buried their dead in pits in the ground, usually placing the bodies in a crouched or foetal position, and then covered them over with soil and stones. Thirty five such inhumations have been found at Knowth.

Like their Neolithic predecessors, the Celts of the Iron Age liked to place grave goods with their dead, so with the bodies were found necklaces made of glass beads and bronze finger rings as well. The most interesting find however was that of two men buried together with a gaming set made up of three bone dice and some counters. These men had been decapitated, so maybe they were both in debt to the wrong person, or maybe gaming was illegal in this community, especially if gambling was involved, and they were sentenced to death. Who knows?

St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, and the next phase in Knowth's history was during the early Christian period, between the 8th and 12th centuries. By now, the smaller tombs which had been built during the Neolithic, had almost disappeared without trace, since they had collapsed, or been used as quarries for building, while the slippage of stones from the main mound had begun to raise the ground level of the entire site and hide the foundations which were left.

By now, Knowth had completed its conversion from an important spiritual centre for one society to an important political centre for another, much later one. Knowth was now the capital of one of Ireland's 150 kingdoms, that of North Brega, and became the tribal headquarters for a branch of the O' Neill dynasty. One of the earlier kings who lived on top of the main mound was called Congallach Cnogbha, and he had gone on to become one of the High Kings of Ireland, possibly based at Tara. Congallach Cnogbha took his name from Knowth's ancient title, Cnogbha, which came from the Gaelic term Cnoc Bua, meaning the Hill of Bua, who was supposedly buried here.

At least three of the Christians living here entered the main tomb and we know this because they signed their names on the stones before they left. These graffiti artists were called Conan, Teimtennach and Snedges, which are all old Gaelic names. Most of the original Celtic Gaels of the Iron Age probably would not have entered the tombs out of fear, because they believed that these tombs were gateways to the Otherworld, and the homes of the Tuatha de Danann, a mythical race of supernatural people who had fled to the Otherworld when the Celts arrived. Christianity had diluted such superstition however.

The final significant phase of Knowth's history was during the Norman period. These invaders arrived from England in 1169, but it wasn't until 1175 that they got as far Knowth, the capital of North Brega, and used it as a military base for their conquest of Meath. By that time however, all the lands around Knowth were in the hands of the Cistercian monks of Mellifont Abbey. The Cistercians had arrived from Clairveaux in France in 1142 and 40,000 acres of land had been given to them by O' Rourke, the arch rival of the O' Neills, in 1157. By giving away the ancient O' Neill capital to the church, O' Rourke was attempting to humiliate his defeated enemy, and also trying to increase his own chances of getting into heaven as well.

The Cistercians renamed much of the land around here, and this included Newgrange. A 'grange' is an area of farmland attached to a monastery, and so the land around the tomb, which was before that known as Brú na Bóinne, was now a New Grange belonging to Mellifont Abbey. In this area you will also find the townlands of Littlegrange, and Sheepgrange, as well as Roughgrange, which is where the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre was built.

We don't know the details of the arrangement between the monks of Mellifont and the Norman invaders who built a fortress on the mound here at Knowth. Perhaps they were borrowing it without charge, or maybe they were paying rent. Whatever the arrangement, the Normans recognised the strategic and defensive advantages of the main mound, just like their Iron Age predecessors. They built their fortress out of stone and mortar on the mound, and this building had a tiled roof. It may also have had a chapel, because fragments of stained glass were found, along with pieces of floor tiles bearing the word Maria, the Latin for Mary. Maybe one of the conditions of the agreement between the monks and the Normans was that a chapel had to be included in the building.

The Normans probably had no idea what they were living on, thinking that it was a natural hill in the landscape. But what had started life as a place of burial and ritual over 4000 years earlier had now become a base for knights in shining armour and a headquarters for military conquest. They didn't stay very long though — about a year — and once they had established their authority in the area, they moved on and built more permanent castles elsewhere.

Once they had left, settlement at Knowth was stepped down dramatically. A few stone houses were built in the 16th and 17th centuries, but on the whole, Knowth became forgotten, blending into the landscape like its sister tombs, Newgrange and Dowth.

Knowth is now in its latest, and presumably final phase of human activity. The archaeologists arrived in 1962, led by Prof. George Eogan from UCD, and they won't be leaving for a few years yet. They have excavated about one third of the site and restored seven of the seventeen small tombs to what they would have looked like when they were first built 5,000 years ago, in the Neolithic, Knowth's most glorious and important phase.

All the tombs in the Boyne Cemetery are passage graves, and as the name suggests, a passage grave is a long, narrow passage made of vertical and horizontal stone slabs and this passage leads directly to a burial chamber at the end. The passage and chamber are then covered over by a huge mound, or what we call a 'cairn' made up of layers of stones, turves and soil. Unlike Newgrange which only has one passage, Knowth has two; one faces due east, the other due west. The Eastern Passage is called a 'cruciform' passage because the chamber at the end of it is divided into three side recesses, like the one at Newgrange. The Western Passage is called an 'Undifferentiated Passage' because it's hard to differentiate between the passage and the burial chamber itself. The entrance to the Western Passage was marked by the large pillar-like stone over there. It's 34m or over a hundred feet long.

Inside the chambers you will find basin stones. It was on these basin stones that they placed the cremated remains of the dead. The bodies were burned outside, and then their ashes and bones were brought inside — perhaps on animal skins — and placed on the basin stones. Along with the ashes and charred bones, they placed grave goods. These were just everyday things which the people had when they were alive. So they would have placed jewellery such as stone balls, coloured beads, pendants and necklaces made out of sea shells, as well as tools such as flint arrowheads, knives, chisels and scrapers. The basin stone from the Western chamber is now stuck in the passage, because at some stage in the tomb's later history, someone tried to remove it without realising that the basin stone was wider than the passage itself. Maybe, it was Conan, Teimtennach or Snedges who made the blunder, or perhaps all three were in it together!

We can only begin to imagine the effort which the Neolithic people put into building this mound. They had to bring tens of thousands of tonnes of water-rolled stones from the banks and bed of the River Boyne, a thousand yards from of here, carrying them in wicker baskets. Then they had to get these giant boulders, or kerbstones, up here from the quarry at Tullyallen which is 15km or about 9 miles away. They weigh anythting up to 5 tonnes each! We think that they would have used a method known as 'log-rolling' which means they would have cut paths through the thick forests, then using the trees they had cut down made wooden rollers, placed these rollers side by side on the ground, and then hoisted the boulders on top. Then they would pull and push the boulders the entire distance from the quarry up to the construction site. It sounds fairly simple, but it you have 80 people pulling one of these stones, it would probably take them about three weeks to get it up here! There are 127 kerbstones around the base of the mound — thirty more than Newgrange — and hundreds more inside the mound itself making up the passages and the corbelled-vauted roof of the eastern chamber.

Finally, they brought quartz from the Wicklow Mountains and water-rolled granite from the base of the Mourne Mountains at Dundalk Bay up here. The Wicklow Mountains are 80km or 50 miles south of here; a two hour journey by car today. But 5,000 years ago, that was a much bigger undertaking because about 98% of Ireland was covered in thick forests, and the horse had not been introduced to this country yet. So the best way they could get to Wicklow was to build tiny little boats out of animal skin and wood called coracles and row these down the River Boyne for 14km ( 9 miles ) until they came to the mouth of the river at modern-day Drogheda, and then turn south and row down the Irish Sea for 50 miles, or 80km, until they came to Wicklow, gather a few of those stones in the bottom of their little boat and row all the way back. They then had to do the same to get to Dundalk Bay which is 50km ( 30 miles ) North of here. These would have been dangerous, life threatening journeys, and it would have taken hundreds of them to get the stones needed up here. So we can only begin to imagine the dedication and commitment they had to what they were doing; it's really quite impossible for us to grasp.

At Newgrange, the quartz and granite formed a spectacular wall at the front of the mound which was rebuilt in the 1970s, but here at Knowth, Prof. Eogan believes that these stones were set into the ground and perhaps formed a ceremonial walkway, or maybe a gathering area in front to the passage openings. It's hard to say for sure.

One third of all the Megalithic Art in the whole of Western Europe is found on this site — that's about 300 decorated stones. Two thirds of all the Megalithic Art in Western Europe is actually here in the Boyne Valley. Megalithic Art is simply art done on a big stone and it comes from the Greek, Mega Lithos, meaning big stone. It was done using two methods: by scratching the stones with a piece of sharp, pointed flint ( Incision ), or by using a piece of flint and a stone hammer to pick the natural surface of the stone away and thereby form the patterns. This was called Picking, or Pocking.

We have no idea what the symbols on these stones mean, if they mean anything at all. Many people have their own theories, but none of these theories can be proven or disproven. The spiral is very common, not only here but throughout the world, and many believe that it represents the sun, which was incredibly important to these Neolithic people. Others have suggested that the spiral symbolises a gateway to the Otherworld or the world of the spirits. Another theory suggests that the spirals are a symbol of life: life is a labyrinth and we never know which way to turn, and life can never go back to where it was before, just like the spiral. Others think they are designed to trap evil spirits, because even today many cultures believe that evil spirits travel in straight lines. Tests were done during the sixties using hallucinogenic drugs and the subjects drew similar designs to what we have here, so perhaps when the artists working at Knowth were gathering food in the forests around the site, they were also picking magic mushrooms: who knows?

A lot of the art was hidden, i.e. carved onto the reverse or underside of the stones. Some believe that the artists were practising first until they became good enough to draw the art which would be seen; others think that they were recycled from earlier structures; while other people believe that the art was not meant for the eyes of the living at all — it was meant for the spirits of the dead and for the gods and goddesses that these people worshipped, so it did not matter that the living would never see it again.

On the site you can see two of the souterrains built by the Christians. Some were for hiding during times of attack, but others were built to store food. The word comes from the French phrase, sous terrain, which means 'under ground'. They were used to store food because, like the original passages inside the mound, they remained dry and at a constant temperature of 10º Celsius. They also kept out flies, dust and rats and hid the settlement's food supply from raiders, especially Vikings.

You can also see where there was once a Neolithic house. Wooden posts in the ground mark where the archaeologists uncovered post holes which formed the perimeter of the house, and this house has been reconstructed at the Visitor Centre using the information found here. Carbon-dating puts this house at 3,500 BC, five hundred years before the building of the tombs themselves. Of course, like all the other dwellings for the living of this community, this house left no trace above ground and would not have lasted very long. Nor would it have been very comfortable, or even all that safe: one stray spark from the fire inside would destroy it in minutes. But yet they built these magnificent monuments for their dead ancestors which have lasted for thousands of years, and will last for thousands more. This is the most striking piece of evidence for their commitment to their dead and to their belief in the after life. They spent 50 years building just the main tomb, travelling up and down the Irish coast in tiny coracles, taking their lives into their hands with each journey. And they dragged hundreds of 5 tonne boulders up here for the kerb on wooden rollers. And even in 1998 fifty years is a long time, but five thousand years ago, it was more than a lifetime. The average life expectancy in the Neolithic was only about 30 - 35 years, which meant that the people who designed the tomb and laid down the first stones were probably well aware that they would never get to see it finished; it was their children and their grandchildren who finished the tomb and finally got to bury their dead inside. Indeed, the first occupants of the tomb were quite possibly the very people who started to build it in the first place.

The Neolithic house here predates the main tomb, and so do some of the smaller mounds. Two 'satellite' tombs were found to be in the way when the main tomb was being built. But instead of ploughing straight through the smaller tombs, the builders accommodated them. The mound curves in to avoid one small one, and another was incorporated into the main mound. The passage had to be altered when this was being done however. Again, this proves the respect they had for their dead. In this tomb were found the remains of 9 adults, 7 children and a baby. Grave goods were also found in here, which included some Carrowkeel pottery, a style of pottery normally associated with Carrowkeel, another megalithic cemetery in Sligo. Maybe the occupants of the tomb were from Sligo, or at least trading with Sligo people. The tomb also contained a broach pin made from the leg of a small bird.

At one point the visitor to Knowth will climb some steps and travel forward in time by 4,000 years from the Neolithic ground level to the foundations of the early Christian house, and will see just how high the ground had risen by then. The whole site would have been at this level by the 8th century, so you realise how the smaller tombs had become forgotten after they had collapsed, and been completely robbed of stone. This Christian house was rectangular with stone foundations, but wooden walls and a roof of thatch. It also had a souterrain, but this time the souterrain was used for defence reasons. The opening was covered by a mat, or a bed, or table so that during attack the occupants of this house could take refuge inside and hope that they would not be followed. The Vikings attacked Knowth at least five times during the 9th and 10th centuries, and as the capital of North Brega, this settlement was under constant threat from rival kingdoms, especially nearby South Brega.

There is also a medieval kiln on the site which dates to the Norman period between the 12th and 14th centuries. It would have had a platform, possibly of linen, onto which grain was placed. A fire was then lit at the opening and as the warm air circulated into the kiln, the grain was dried so that it could be ground to make flour. It is the only visible remnant from the Norman period which you will see today.

From the fence which keeps the visitor out from where excavations are on-going, you can see the opening of the Eastern Passage. This is the one which is cruciform, or cross-shaped like the passage and chamber at Newgrange. The chamber here is more than twice as long though — about 40m, or 120ft. The chamber has a corbelled-vaulted roof, again like Newgrange. This term means that the roof was built by placing giant stone slabs ( called corbels ) in circular layers, with each layer slightly overlapping the layer beneath, so that as it goes up, the roof becomes narrower all the time until eventually it forms a dome. This roof has remained perfectly intact for 5,000 years without any mortar or concrete of any kind, and just like Newgrange, has remained completely water-tight for all that time. At Newgrange this was achieved by sloping the slabs at a downward angle and by carving narrow grooves onto the backs of the slabs to act as gutters. At Knowth, these grooves were not necessary because the stones and soil on top of the roof was packed so tightly that it remained water-tight without them.

One of the most interesting finds at Knowth was the Macehead, discovered in 1982 by a man called Liam O' Connor in the Eastern chamber. It was carved from Scottish flint and seems to represent the head of a male figure, possibly a god. It probably went on the top of a wooden staff and was used to lead ceremonial precessions, but we don't know for sure. Maybe it belonged to a high priest or priestess and was buried with him or her when they died. Or maybe it too remained in the chamber to frighten away the evil spirits. A replica can be seen in the Visitor Centre, but the real thing is in the National Museum in Dublin.

Everyone knows that the passage and chamber at Newgrange becomes illuminated on the shortest day of the year; the Winter Solstice. But few know that Knowth gets lit up twice, on the same day. This Eastern passage is aligned to the rising sun of the Equinox in March and September, when day and night are equal in length. Unfortunately the large farm house across the road, which was built in the 1860s, blocks this now. But the Western passage is aligned to the setting sun on the same day.

We don't know why the people who built these tombs wanted these chambers lit up on these special days, but they must have had a very good reason for doing it because it must have taken decades of planning and research before they laid the very first stones of the tomb in order to get it to work. Some believe that they simply acted as calendars, marking the changing seasons for these farmers. When the sun shone in on March 21st, it was time to plant the crops, and when it shone in on the 23rd of September, it was harvest time.

Others believe that there was a much more spiritual reason for it; that they worshipped the sun as a god or a goddess and that the sun was entering the tomb to give life back to the spirits of the dead resting inside and to lead their spirits back outside to join with the sun, or to live on in the air around their living descendants. We just don't know.

The question remains as to who was buried in the main mound? Were they the most important people of the time, like the political and spiritual leaders and other wise people, while the more ordinary people were buried in the smaller tombs? Or did everybody have a chance to rest in the larger tombs, like Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, so that once the sun had gone inside and brought new life to their spirits, the cremated remains could be brought back outside and then buried in the smaller tombs? And perhaps this process was then repeated, year after year. Like so much here at Knowth, it's open to interpretation and you can believe what ever you wish. No one can tell you you're wrong, and no one can prove you're right!





Knowth is open from May until October.
Access through the "Brú na Bóinne" Visitor Centre only.