Loughcrew, the Hill of the Witch, is the ideal place to be today. Its history, writes Eileen Battersby, is full of myth and speculation.
Imagine a witch, a hag, menace alive in her face, racing across the landscape, scattering stones from her apron in her haste. These pebbles, in falling from the sky, become huge as they touch the earth along a spine-like ridge and create a serene world of stone, shapes randomly arranged across three magical hillsides. This is the wonder of Loughcrew, Sliabh na Callighe, a place of beauty and mystery in the northern point of Co Meath, near Oldcastle, where the flat plain begins to undulate, acquiring a rolling, near drumlin-like topography. On a clear day the view embraces 18 counties.
Whatever the weather, whatever the season, whatever the visibility, Loughcrew - freely accessible, uncompromised, unfettered by development - invariably succeeds in being both familiar and new. The longest day, which dawned this morning, and, particularly, the short nights which surround it, create the ideal mood for investigating mysterious, atmospheric places.
Legend has it that the old hag, the cailleach, believed that were she to fill her apron with stones and leap from hilltop to hilltop, dropping a handful on each of the three summits, she would become the mistress of all Ireland. The game old girl certainly had a go. Perhaps she even rested, mid-effort, as her seat, the Hag's Chair, a massive kerb stone at Cairn T on Carnbane East, still faces north like an immense throne. She may well have sat here, smoking her pipe - she was the assertive type - pondering the next act in her campaign.
Ambition, alas, is a dangerous thing, and as she prepared to make another great leap towards immortality she fell and broke her neck. There she lies to this day, buried on the eastern slope of Patrickstown Hill, lamenting her fate, her voice but a faint screech on the wind, with no one to mourn her save a vast collection of silent witnesses: the stones she scattered. A simple inscribed cross decorates her seat. It is unlikely it was intended as her memorial. Who made this mark, and why, remain yet more mysteries.
So Sliabh na Callighe, the Hill of the Witch - or the Loughcrew Hills, taking their name, as the scholar John O'Donovan suggested in the 1830s, from a small local lake - is a place that lends itself to story, myth and speculation. Whatever the name, whatever about the lady herself, it is obvious that many lie here.
It is a place of spirits. At times the natural peace acquires an eerie resonance. Humans have wandered this spot for at least 5,000 years. Loughcrew is an extensive Neolithic hilltop cemetery, on three relatively flat summits, consisting of the remains of about 30 passage graves built between 3000 BC and 2000 BC but continuing in use in to the Iron Age.
It is one of four major passage-tomb complexes in Ireland, all dating from the late Stone Age. The others are Brú na Bóinne, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, also in Co Meath, some 35 miles to the south-east. West across the country, in Co Sligo, in a line that looks more deliberate than coincidental, lie the extensive burial grounds of Carrowmore, sketched by the artist Gabriel Beranger in 1779, surveyed by George Petrie for the Ordnance Survey in 1837 and believed to have once included a possible 200 monuments.
High in the eerie Bricklieve Mountains, overlooking Lough Arrow, and also in Co Sligo, is the majestic site at Carrowkeel, a place that enchanted both the great R.A.S. Macalister, scholar and first professor of archaeology at University College Dublin, who liked to see himself as a pragmatist, and Robert Lloyd Praeger. It was Praeger who wrote of his awareness of being the first person to enter one of the tombs since the ancients moved on. Both Carrowkeel and Loughcrew share the glories of the spring and autumn equinoxes. It is possible to experience the sun rise at Loughcrew and, by driving across Ireland, arrive at Carrowkeel to see it set.
All are cemeteries, yet these four Neolithic complexes were also ceremonial places used for celebration. All are open-air art galleries. All are beautiful, with Loughcrew - often host to a flock of grazing sheep, and recently white with hawthorn blossom - possessing a particularly pastoral quality. It boasts its share of decorated stones - more than 120, according to Elizabeth Shee Twohig.
Among the range of motifs is the sun, represented by an equinox symbol of eight rays. Just as the early people respected and honoured their dead, they celebrated, worshipped and certainly observed the sun in its many guises throughout the changing seasons. As at Newgrange, science and ritual meet in creating a mystery.
Cairn T, flanked by six smaller, satellite tombs, is the largest in the complex. Its design is similar to that of the Newgrange mound, albeit on a far smaller scale. The passage, which is intact, is also much shorter than its dramatic, slowly climbing Newgrange counterpart and has an unexpected feature: sillstones over which the visitor must step. Tim O'Brien, author of Light Years Ago (1992), a study of the sun's movements at Newgrange and Loughcrew, suggests that Cairn T was originally covered in quartz, "giving it a white appearance even till recent times, thus earning the name Carn Bane (the White Cairn)". It is an interesting theory, and he also speculates that this use of quartz would have made the cairn visible from a distance.
Standing at the cairn offers a panoramic view that contrasts dramatically with the intimacy of the cairn's interior. Inside are three chambers; the middle one, at the back, is the deepest and obviously most central, between two smaller side chambers. The backstone of the main chamber is a riot of rich decoration, including flower motifs and circles, dominated by the equinox sun symbol. Light filters down on the stone through a grille-covered opening in the corbelled roof of the mound. One cold spring-equinox morning some years ago the burning sunlight appeared as if dispatched by God himself.
On our most recent visit, on an evening of drifting mists, a swallow appeared to be holding court. The small bird observed the humans gathered below, glanced as we placed a few flowers and a broad bean in the main chamber, then flew away. We waited in the grey light, which became luminous and unexpectedly bright. It was as if late evening had suddenly decided to revert to mid- afternoon.
Such things happen at Loughcrew. I remember another visit, late on a winter afternoon some years ago, with my special dogs, Bilbo and Frodo. They had been patrolling, shoulder to shoulder, contented. Suddenly, their back hairs rose. The dogs stopped as one and began a low snarling that thickened to a growl only to abruptly stop. They stared up at something apparently only a few feet away. I saw nothing but felt a slow, creeping chill, and we hurried down the hillside.
It is not surprising. Every ancient site houses its ghosts. On another spring equinox a brilliant gold light struck the cairn and appeared to set it ablaze. Just as the December solstice at Newgrange heralds the beginning of the slow death of winter, the March equinox brings with it the promise of the coming summer. An ambivalence surrounds the summer solstice: for all the celebration of the year's longest day there is also an element of regret. Summer peaked today, and now the sun has taken the first step towards the departure that will lead us back to the inevitable darkness of winter, with its long nights, and the vigil that awaits the return of the sun.
There is no summer-solstice alignment at Newgrange, where June 21st is just another day. Celebration instead looks to the Hill of Tara. In contrast to the formality of Newgrange, which has been developed and is as closely monitored as one would expect a World Heritage Site to be, Loughcrew retains its natural beauty. Here it is still possible to wander without being part of an official party in the care of a guide. Unlike Newgrange, Loughcrew offers silence.
Tim O'Brien's book, graced by many beautiful photographs, includes a historic first shot of the beam of direct sunlight striking the backstone of Cairn T, on September 13th, 1986, after a stone at the cairn's entrance had been removed. On Carnbane West stand 14 tombs, including Cairns D and L, both of focal importance. Cairn L contains a passage leading to a central chamber. Cairn H was excavated in 1943, unearthing bone objects decorated in the La Tene style of the Iron Age.
Below the hill, among a stand of trees, is a ruined church associated with St Oliver Plunkett, who was born in Loughcrew in 1625. Yet it is to Cairn T that the imagination returns, because of its relationship with the sun.
As for its modern history, Loughcrew came to notice about 100 years after Newgrange. In 1798 a local landowner called Naper, whose family remains custodian of the tombs and now holds the key to the cairns, had his land surveyed. Members of the Architectural Society of Oxford were treated to a description of the cairns in 1858, while five years later Eugene Conwell discovered, or rather rediscovered, the cairns, publishing an important study, The Discovery Of The Tomb Of Ollamh Fodhla, in 1873. Initial excavations took place at that time.
Practical discovery walks hand in hand with mystery and myth. By the mid-18th century the village that would become Oldcastle was established. It seems fitting that the natural beauty of the place will be complemented by an Opera À La Carte production of Don Giovanni, on Friday July 9th and Saturday 10th, at Loughcrew Historic Gardens, nearby. Few could object to the glory of Mozart's music briefly challenging the silence.
