The origin of Newgrange
Of course today is the Winter Solstice.
It's a time for retrospection and hope. A time for peace and forgiveness.
A time for drunkenness, debauchery and the deflowering of virgins [not that there’s many of them around these days].
It is the day that is celebrated by the meeja here in Ireland by waffling on about Newgrange and the sun shining down the passage to light the chamber at the end.
This year that didn't happen.
It was cloudy so the sun was obscured.
And this got me thinking. They were obviously very sophisticated in aligning this prehistoric monument to catch the sunrise on the Winter Solstice. But if they were so sophisticated, why would they build what is in essence a clock that is only right on one day a year? And how could they rely on that one date being cloud free on sunrise? Unless they had no clouds back in those days it was a monumental error to rely on a timepiece that might only properly work once every five or six years. Miss that one day and your whole agricultural year is fucked.
I still maintain that Newgrange is in fact Ireland's first lapdancing club.
It makes more sense.
Deflowering virgins? Um…no thanks. Considering the age that the younger set have sex these days, you'd probably have to look to the below 15 group before you'd find any and I'm too old for prison.
And I've always been rather amused that "Christmas" with all it's traditions and rituals (including the Christmas tree) was and is almost completely pagan in origin. So…
Happy Winter Solstice to you and yours, Grandad.
Just about everything about Christmas is Pagan in origin – the date, holly and ivy, mistletoe, the Christmas tree to name but a few. The only thing of Christian origin that I can think of is Santa!
And very Happy Solstice to you and your Herself too.
Makes you wonder if the winters then wherent so fucking god awful
Lapdancing in broad winter? Those Druids at Newgrange shulda constructed an elaborate mathematical stone contraption to catch the shining sun on the summer solstice. Or has the Irish climate changed – was the winter then summer and the summer winter?
I've been nursing a hunch that the monks who built the round towers around 800 AD were in fact toying with rocket science. If only they'd sent St. Brendan the navigator to China instead of to America they woulda had the loud banger fuel to send a prototype round tower rocket into space. Good old Sino-Hibernian knowhow would now be in the encyclopedias.
" deflowering of virgins [not that there’s many of them around these days]. "
Doesn't matter any more, at my age I can't cope with many.
Truth be told no fucker has the slightest clue who built the thing nor when nor why.
Maybe it's just a random pile of rocks left by a Bronze Age farmer when he was clearing a field?