Brú na Bóinne

Also Known As: Middle Irish Brug na Bóinde, “the mansion of the Boyne”; the great mound within it is Sí an Bhrú, called Newgrange in English; in the tales it is the Brug of the Mac Óc
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It is a dwelling rather than a grave, a house inside a hill where the Tuatha Dé Danann keep company beyond age and weather, and where a year can be spent in what feels like a night.
Role in Mythos: It is the chief síd of the Boyne, built by the Dagda and taken from him by a wordplay about days and nights, after which it belongs to Óengus the Mac Óc.
Relation to Humans: Mortals cannot open it by force, and the one king who tried, Eochaid Airem, dug at the mounds of Ireland for a year and three months and found that whatever he unearthed by day was made whole again by morning. What the living get instead is the outside of it, a green hill above a river bend, and the knowledge that the door opens at Samain for reasons that have nothing to do with them.

On the shortest mornings of the year the sun comes up behind Red Mountain at Donore, and a narrow blade of light slips through a slot cut above the doorway of a hill in County Meath. It runs the length of a stone passage and settles on a triple spiral carved into the slab at the back of the chamber. The people who arranged that were farming the Boyne valley around 3200 BC. They left no name for the hill, no account of what they thought was happening, and nothing at all that can be read. What survives instead is a much later Irish version, set down by monks some three and a half thousand years afterwards, which takes one look at the mound and concludes that it is obviously a house, and that somebody obviously lives in it.

The house is Brú na Bóinne, the mansion of the Boyne, and it is not one building. Forty passage tombs stand inside that loop of river, three of them enormous: the mound the Irish called Sí an Bhrú and the English later called Newgrange, with Cnobha and Dubhadh, Knowth and Dowth, set on either side. Between them they carry the largest collection of megalithic art in western Europe. Kerbstones and upright slabs are covered in spirals, lozenges, chevrons and cup marks, pecked into hard rock with harder stone, still crisp enough after five thousand years to take a shadow and hold it.

Medieval Irish place-lore reads the whole bend as occupied ground. One of the poems on the Brug opens by pointing at the mound in front of the listener and telling them what it is: a king’s dwelling, built by the harsh Dagda, a shelter and a keep renowned for strength. Then it walks the visitor round the site like a steward with a set of keys. The Bed of the red Dagda is on the slope. The two Paps of the king’s consort lie west of the fairy mansion, and Cermait was born at that spot. Here is the Grave of Esclam, where good men used to cast lots; here the Well of Bualc; here the Grave of the Horse of the king. The Comb and the Casket of the woman stand somewhere in the complex and will stand, the poet says, until Doom comes, their beauty undiminished. A barrow covers the bones of a sluggish beast called the Matha, which the kings of Ireland killed by walking up to it in turn and each planting his stone in it. There is a spot where the great Morrígan was smitten. Every hump in that landscape has a name and a corpse and a story, and the poem’s refrain is not a question but a challenge: do you know this one? Do you know that one?

The Dagda built it. The Dagda did not keep it. Here the sources part company in a way worth stating plainly, because retellings usually flatten it. In the Wooing of Étaín the holder of the Brug is Elcmar, whose wife Eithne, also called Boand, the Dagda wants; the Dagda sends Elcmar off on an errand to Mag nInis and works spells so that nine months pass for him as a single day, with the darkness of night lifted and hunger and thirst kept from him, and in that stretched afternoon Óengus is conceived and born. In the short tale called the Taking of the Síd, and in the place-lore, it is the Dagda himself who is dispossessed, and he goes off to live at Ochan. The method does not change. It is a lawyer’s trick.

Óengus was reared away from the Boyne, at Brí Léith with Midir, until a boy of the Fir Bolg taunted him for having no known father and the whole arrangement came out. His father acknowledged him and then refused him land, because the land Óengus wanted was occupied. So the advice was this: go to the Brug at Samain, when nobody in Ireland is at enmity with anybody, and go armed. The holder will be standing on the mound with nothing in his hand but a fork of white hazel, his cloak folded around him and a gold brooch in it, three fifties of youths playing on the field below. Threaten him, spare him, and ask in payment to be king of the Brug for a day and a night. It went exactly that way. The next morning, asked to leave, Óengus observed that the world is spent in days and nights, and that he had therefore been given all of it. The case went to the Dagda, who ruled that a bargain is a bargain, and Elcmar took a consolation holding at Cleitech to the south with the fruits of the Boyne, and thereafter watched his own youths play in a field he no longer owned. The mound stopped being the síd of the Brug and became the Brug of the Mac Óc.

After that it is the place people are carried to. Midir came visiting a year later, on Samain again, and a quarrel broke out among the boys on the green. He went down to make peace and someone threw a spit of holly, and he came back up the slope with his eye in his hand. Óengus fetched Dian Cécht and had him made whole. Later still Étaín, turned by a jealous rival first into water, then into a worm, then into a purple fly the size of a man’s head whose wingbeat was sweeter than pipes and horns and whose eyes shone like stones in the dark, was blown around Ireland for seven years without a hill or a tree she could rest on, until she came down on the fringe of Óengus’s cloak while he stood on the mound of the Brug. He gathered her into the fleece of it and carried her indoors, to a sun-bower with bright windows and the air thick with the smell of herbs, and he slept beside her there every night until her colour came back.

That is what the Brug does. It shelters, it heals, it holds time loosely, and it hands out the two things the tales value most, which are hospitality and a soft place to be broken in. Its limit is equally plain. It cannot be entered by a mortal who has not been let in. When Eochaid Airem lost his wife into the mounds he brought the warriors of Ireland and dug, and dug at another síd for a year and three months, and every morning found the previous day’s work standing whole again. He got her back by negotiation in the end, and even then was handed fifty identical women and told to choose.

Nobody knows what the builders called it.

The Neolithic dead were laid there with mushroom-headed pins of bone and antler and small polished stone balls whose purpose is still anyone’s guess. Beaker and Bronze Age people came back to it. So did people of the Iron Age, and after them Romans or Britons carrying Roman things, who left coins near the kerb with holes bored through them so they could be worn, and bronze brooches of the third century AD, apparently as offerings. The passage stayed open, more or less, for a very long time. The antiquarian who came up the field in 1699 and recognised what he was looking at was arriving late to a site that had been receiving visitors for four thousand years. When Michael O’Kelly began excavating for the Office of Public Works in 1962 the local country people already said the chamber filled with sun on the shortest morning, though nobody living had seen it. On 21 December 1967 he stood inside and watched it happen.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Brú na Bóinne?

Brú na Bóinne is a prehistoric monument complex inside a bend of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, and in Irish mythology it is the chief otherworld dwelling of the Boyne. The name means roughly “the mansion of the Boyne”. It contains around forty passage tombs, the three largest being Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, built around 3200 BC.

Who lives in Brú na Bóinne?

Óengus, called the Mac Óc, is the owner of Brú na Bóinne in the Irish tales. His father the Dagda built the mound and originally held it, but Óengus obtained it by asking to be king there for a day and a night and then arguing that all time consists of days and nights. In the Wooing of Étaín the figure tricked out of the Brug is Elcmar rather than the Dagda, and the sources genuinely disagree on this point.

Why does the sun shine into Newgrange at the winter solstice?

A deliberate opening above the entrance of Newgrange, called the roof-box, admits the rising sun for a few days centred on 21 December, and the beam travels down the passage and strikes a triple spiral carved on a slab in the chamber. The alignment was built in, not accidental. Michael O’Kelly and his team were the first modern people to observe it, on 21 December 1967, during excavations that ran from 1962 to 1975.

Can mortals enter Brú na Bóinne in the myths?

Not by force. When King Eochaid Airem tried to recover his wife by digging into the síd-mounds, he and his warriors laboured for a year and three months and found each day’s excavation restored by the following morning. Entry in the stories comes through invitation, bargain or trickery, and the door is associated with Samain, when Óengus made his own claim on the place.

What can still be seen at Brú na Bóinne today?

The mounds, their carved kerbstones and the passages themselves survive, and Brú na Bóinne holds the largest concentration of megalithic art in western Europe. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage property in 1993. Objects recovered from Newgrange, including stone balls, bone pins and Roman coins converted into pendants, are held by the National Museum of Ireland.