Knowth.

My last day in Ireland I'd saved for Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth. To get there one must sign up for a tour. Misery. Pestilence. Woe. Most often, I believe, the hired coaches only go to Newgrange, the most widely known of the three, but I befriended the driver, told him how much I'd like to see everything I could, and he did a fantastic job of convincing his other customers that they all wanted this as well.

Previous scholarship held that these were the oldest megalithic sites in Ireland, built by foreigners new from mainland Europe. It was believed that as their creators bred and died and left the work to their less worthy descendants, the technologies and skills devolved. As the sites moved north and west and more time passed they became sloppier and simpler, the monuments at Carrowmore and Carrowkeel little more than a few inadequate stones clumsily piled atop the dead. I cannot recall who the originators of these theories are, but I detect at least a hint of anti-Irish sentiment. Fortunately, some lovely Swedish academics arrived and, with the deadly precision of their thesis, told their predecessors to eat it. Their more recent work suggests the opposite: that the first ancient Irish megalithic sites were those in the Northwest, that they grew in complexity and scale until creating a wonder, not just by the standards of a small place like Ireland, but standing out among the entire ancient world.

Dowth, the smallest of the three sites, is closed, so I've still not seen it. But Knowth is lovely: imagine a series of earthen mounds, perfectly round things clustered together, suggesting perhaps mushrooms, or hobbit houses. The domes are all covered over in grass, and some are ringed at the base with large stones. Many of the stones are marked with carvings, mysterious and intricate. There are spiral shapes, little suns and what might be stars, lines, curves, sharp and jagged things. It could be a language. It might be a system of magical notation, either set sigils the entire culture would have recognised, or a map to a more personal shamanism. They could be the boring hallucinatory scribblings any modern creature who has dabbled in such things would recognise, or stations at which worshipers could meditate. They could be nothing more than art, and nothing less. Of all of the ancient art of this type yet discovered in Europe, more than one third sleeps at Knowth, speaking in strange and subtle tongues, misunderstood differently by all who see it.

Inside of these artificial hills are caves. The same boulders that embrace the hillocks without reach into them, forming long corridors and their ceilings, being the walls and roofs of chambers, often roughly cruciform in shape. I walked into a few of them. I knelt in them, pressed my face to the cold stone.

One of the mounds, which is really more of a ring fort, is a Christian creation, which is strange. The messengers of the new faith did not bring violence against Ireland's people, but they were usually savage in destroying the objects and sites held sacred to the old religion. Knowth should have been smashed, but instead they not only allowed it to stand, but built a little cave of their own.