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.

Newgrange.

Newgrange is brilliant. It's a single mound, similar to those at Knowth, only much larger. It had been lost to history, thought only a natural hill and used as farmlands. Occasionally a lump of quartz would turn up there, and when the Scottish landlord who owned the place decided to begin mining for the stuff, Newgrange itself must have cried out and revealed itself. The first men to touch shovel to earth there dug directly to that famous entrance stone, to those carvings, and stopped immediately. They knew that what they had found was very old, and very important.

The place has since been restored to what a pile of important academics assure us is very near its original state. It's ringed in skull sized lumps of quartz, shining and white, interspersed occasionally with slightly smaller dark stones in a set pattern. Like at Dowth, the base is haloed with boulders, some of them marked.

The door is guarded by that stone, by spirals and hatches. It's huge and perfect. It could be a map of the Boyne Valley, the fertile river-ringed island contained within Ireland, the spirals marking out Newgrange and Knowth and Dowth, the other shapes representing the surrounding farmland. It could be a map for the souls of the dead entombed there to follow. I'd been to Newgrange once before with my mother and my grandmother. I'm glad to have been allowed to touch it twice. There is a door for humans there, wide like a cave's mouth, and there is a door for the sun, smaller and located above your head. If you don't kneel a bit when entering you'll whack your head on the bottom of its stone frame. I did, in fact, after expressly being warned not to do so. My hat suffered the worst of the blow, but I took the hint and assumed the correct ritual posture.

The ceiling as you enter the long corridor is low, and the walls press close, more narrow near your head. Busy stooping, forced to keep bowing to the place, you do not notice the strong slant in the floor, that in fact you are climbing up. By the time the interior opens into what seems after your crawl an expansive cavern, your feet are precisely level with the sun's door. Both are also level with the horizon as viewed in the distance from the entrance. You're standing underground; you're standing where the earth meets the sky.

Newgrange is five-thousand years old, older by five-hundred years than the Egyptian pyramids. The ceiling of the central chambers is shaped a bit like a beehive rising high above your head, and corbelled, which is to say pieced together with flat stones piled atop one another and fitted together. No mortar was used. The construction was precise: in all that time, cradled by a river and sleeping under weeping Irish skies, it's not leaked once. Lost to us for who knows how long, the interior did not require reconstruction.

Newgrange is cruciform in shape: the stone hall leads to chambers, one before you, one to your left, and one to your right. The carvings inside those spaces are varied. The rooms to your left and right as you enter are covered in them; the one directly before you bares only that triple spiral, beloved but almost a secret placed where it is, to the right of the entrance and facing inward.

Newgrange was there well before the people who first sang the mythologies of Ireland arrived, and ages before the monks eventually stumbled in to record them. So the mythology cannot tell us what Newgrange meant to the builders, but it can tell us something of what it meant to their successors.

Boann had a husband, Nechtan. But she was beautiful, and the Dagda wanted her. So the Dagda gathered his trickery, and sent Nechtan on a journey. And he called up his magic, and he hid himself and Boann in space, within Newgrange, and in time: he built a year in which they could lie together, and he hid it within a single day. They had time enough for one another then, and time enough even to birth a child. The Dagda left at the end of the year, and Nechtan came back at the end of the day, and he was none the wiser.

The son was named Aengus. Through some accident, he was left with no inheritance, so he asked his father for use of Newgrange for a day and a night. Through certain grammatical coincidences in the Irish language, however, "a day and a night" and "day and night" are both described by the same phrase. Therefore, in asking for a short lease, he was also making the place his for all of eternity.

It's about light and dark. It's about sex. It's a time machine that runs on trickery and clever words.

On the winter solstice, at sunrise, a beam of light penetrates the door built for it. It makes its way slowly up the corridor, finally illuminating all three chambers in a way that doesn't quite make sense.

I have two tattoos: a labyrinth on my left shoulder, and a church window on my right arm, shoulder to elbow. My body was built to imitate these structures: spirals carved in the earth; light shining through stone; the sacred reaching into something we mortals made. It's a man's ritual built in the shape of a woman.

Both sites were far too heavily beset with tourists for me to either lose or find myself much there. And the tours were invasive. They preached at us about the science of the place in a way that might have been interesting if I hadn't already known much of it, and allowed us an hour only at each site, including their speeches.

I shook away from the crowd and whispered my name to the place. I breathed and I did not. I followed the stones that held the edge of it. When they too subsided leaving only grass and hill I collapsed on the mound as if I were exhausted and resting my head on a lover's thigh when they were through with me. I bid a hasty adieu and returned to the bus. It wasn't enough. I want to break into these places with you in the dark. I want to find them when they are free.