Thousands of people gathered at Newgrange in the hours before dawn to dance, hold hands, bang drums, chant incantations and otherwise welcome the sun on the winter Solstice.
Recreating a moment with threads that stretch back over 5,000 years, around 2,000 people were ready for the first shards of Solstice sunlight, shortly before 9am.
And while the skies over Newgrange were bright with blue stretching in all directions, the chamber at the heart of the passage tomb was only partially illuminated in the absence of direct beams of sunlight.
The atmosphere was joyous, however, with hundreds of people cheering wildly as the moment of sunrise arrived and people exchanging warm embraces and flasks of coffee and tea.
READ MORE
The winter Solstice is an astronomical phenomenon that marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year.
In the northern hemisphere, the winter Solstice occurs on December 21st when the sun shines directly over the tropic of Capricorn.
At sunrise on the shortest day of the year, for 17 minutes, direct sunlight, weather conditions allowing, can enter the Newgrange monument, not through the doorway, but through the specially contrived small opening above the entrance known as the roof box, to illuminate the chamber.
The event was streamed on the OPW’s website and YouTube site as well as on heritageireland.ie, and on the RTÉ Player.
The winter solstice sunrise was previously streamed live from Newgrange in 2021 amid Covid-19 restrictions.
Celebrations at Brú no Bóinne will continue on Sunday evening at Dowth where the passage tomb is aligned with the solstice sunset.
