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The Guardian
16-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: Skylarks and swallows bring life to the chambered tomb
Unseen hands have tied coloured ribbons to an oak tree at the foot of a whale-backed hill. Whoever crossed the chalk stream to fasten these pretty streamers in red, blue, gold and white found meaning in this place or with the people who came here before – those unknowables who lugged boulders many times their own weight to the top more than 5,000 years ago. We make the ascent, along a modern processional path between fields of wheat to where they fashioned their mound mausoleum. I dwell, as I invariably do at archaeological sites, on the wild bridge between peoples past and present. There are skylarks here, and when they are not skittering across the ground, they rise and rise. Did they enter neolithic cosmology, these birds that sing their way up to the sun? Was there a part for plants too, the last of the nodding cowslips forming a bouquet to carry into the chambered tomb? Did those people admire the spots and lace webbing on the flickering wings of fritillaries that stay low on the breeze-buffeted hillside? Did they draw inspiration from the black on orange for their art? We come to the mouth of this long barrow, where moderns speculate that those here long ago communed with their dead. A pair of swallows appear to fly out from within, and they are held for a symbolic moment against the wind before tilting into it. Ours is a more prosaic sidestepping of giant stone uprights to enter this prehistoric monument. A Spanish couple step out with 'Very impressive' on their lips, and it is too: the heft and deft craft of shaping massive stones into a tunnel and chambers, each cell partitioned from the 'nave' by a waist-high slab. A gleam emanates from halfway down the tunnel, the side of one stone rubbed shiny by countless fingers. I stretch my arms to their full span, locking my fingers on to the whole boulder. I've lifted some rocks less than a fraction of its size lately, and imagine in this one the weight, sweat and straining of real people. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- The Guardian
Country diary: Ancient art to make the imagination soar
From the top of Knowth's great mound, my gaze leaps over its smaller satellite mounds and wanders across an expanse of summer-green fields. This is Brú na Bóinne, a vast neolithic complex looped by the River Boyne, where the landscape is dominated by three artificial 'hills' that were layered over passage tombs built about 5,000 years ago. The most famous of the three is to the south – Newgrange, which is aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. To the east is Dowth, which aligns with winter sunsets. And then there's this one beneath my feet, the great mound, containing two back-to-back chambers facing east and west. As ever with such ancient structures, the big question is: what was it for? The chambers could have been intended to catch the sunlight of the spring and autumn equinoxes (in March and September), when day and night are of equal duration. This is potentially affirmed by the equinoctial shadows cast by lone standing stones towards the east and west passage entrances. But Knowth was also a place of settlement and burial for thousands of years. All that human activity over the millennia damaged its passages, with the sunlight now only reaching a short distance along their lengths. Another intriguing possibility is that the great mound is the result of neolithic people's sophisticated knowledge of astronomy, which integrates an understanding of both the solar and lunar cycles. Knowth's megalithic art – the largest collection in Europe – hints at this purpose. Much of the artwork is on the massive kerbstones that ring the great mound like a giant's prayer beads. I head back down the slope and dawdle from stone to stone. The carved lines create abstract pictures that let the imagination soar. Concentric arcs could be the sun. Repeated waves might trace the moon's path across the sky. And dazzling spirals remind me of Van Gogh's Starry Night. A series of rapid chitterings makes me look up. I'm close to the east entrance, where the reconstructed woodhenge (a circle of timber pillars) stands above the sockets of the original neolithic one. I think of those first builders. They too must have watched chittering swallows. They too must have seen how a flock carves the sky. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
