Shining A Light On Newgrange, Co. Meath, Ireland 1988

Research suggests the builders of Newgrange had sophisticated knowledge of the solar system and astronomical events.

Five thousand years ago Neolithic (late Stone Age) peoples living in Ireland constructed a magnificent burial mound on the banks of the river Boyne.

When the monument was excavated during the 1960s it emerged that sunlight shone into the tomb on the morning of the winter solstice, illuminating the chamber within.

A scientific study by Dr Tom Rea and Dr Tim O’Brien at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) enabled them to calculate what would have happened at the winter solstice when the monument was first constructed.

Tom Rea explains how the study established sunlight would have travelled much further back into the chamber, illuminating the spirals in the recess furthest away from the entrance. This would make the tomb,

Symmetrical to the path of the sun over 5000 years ago.

Their study asserts that it is very unlikely that it was a coincidence that the winter solstice sun shone though the roof box at the entrance to the tomb and along the narrow chamber inside it.

The statistical estimate of it being an accident, as some people have argued in the past, is very very remote.

This puts Newgrange on a par with sites such as Stonehenge in England, even though it was built a thousand years earlier,

It may well be the case that Ireland has the oldest observatory in the world.

This episode of ‘Zero’ was broadcast on 16 November 1988. The reporter is John Murray.

‘Zero’ was a magazine-style programme covering developments in science and technology. The first programme was broadcast on 7 January 1987. The series ran until 1989. The RTÉ Guide published an article about the series in its edition of 2 January 1987.