Abstract
On Midwinter's Day, around four and a half minutes after sunrise, the sun shines down the 'roof-box' of the Neolithic passage graves at Newgrange, Ireland, and illuminates the floor of its main chamber 18 m away. When the monument was constructed, however, first light would have occurred at sunrise in the form of a very narrow beam bisecting the chamber. Here I suggest that the width and height of the gap in the floor of the roof-box may have been deliberate, tracing the path of the Sun at the solstice. Newgrange predates the astronomical structures of Stonehenge by 1,000 years and as such may be the oldest astronomically orientated structure in the world.
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Ray, T. The winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange, Ireland: accident or design?. Nature 337, 343–345 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1038/337343a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/337343a0
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