Brú na Bóinne

Brú na Bóinne — 'the palace' or 'mansion of the Boyne' — is the great bend of the River Boyne in County Meath that holds the passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth along with around ninety other Neolithic monuments, raised in the 32nd century BC. In Irish mythology it was no mere graveyard but the chief dwelling-place of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the otherworldly race said to live on inside the great mounds after their defeat by the Milesians.

Its central myth concerns the Dagda, the chief god, who desired Boann, goddess of the river and wife of Elcmar, the Brú's keeper. He sent Elcmar away on an errand and cast a spell to make 'the sun stand still' for what seemed like a single day — long enough for Boann to conceive and bear a son, Aengus Óg, without Elcmar ever noticing the months that had passed.

When Aengus came of age and learned the truth of his birth, he claimed his own inheritance with a trick to match his father's: he asked to be given Brú na Bóinne for 'a day and night', then pointed out that, since all time consists of days and nights, the gift was eternal — winning the Otherworld palace for himself forever. Some scholars connect the tale to Newgrange's famous winter solstice illumination, when a beam of sunlight enters the inner chamber at dawn, reading it as the moment of Aengus's conception. The site recurs elsewhere in Irish myth too — Aengus later brings his lover Caer, transformed into a swan, to sing the dwellers of the mounds to sleep at Brú na Bóinne, reaffirming it as the great meeting-place between the human world and the Otherworld.