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Country diary: A needle of solstice sunlight reaches into my deep past | Mary Montague

County Meath, Ireland: The very existence of this 5,000-year-old monument, called Newgrange, is remarkable enough. On the shortest day it has truly magical qualitiesThe darkness was tomb-black. Through all of our breathing, the spell thickened as a needle of light stole across the chamber’s floor. The mind is a strange thing, hovering between past and future, aware of its own ability to draw meaning from an occurrence. As the glow lit our shadowy faces, we smiled and murmured with pleasure, but it was stronger emotion that brimmed my eyes.We were inside Newgrange, a neolithic monument built about 5,000 years ago by people who studied the sun’s movement with sufficient attention to pinpoint the moment when the season changed. To catch that brief occurrence, they built a cantilevered stone chamber and covered it with a mound of earth. Above the entrance to the passage from the outside world, they fixed a narrow aperture aligned to the winter solstice. On that day, a clear dawn floods ...

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