Fourknocks Passage Tomb, Co. Meath, Ireland

June 14, 2017

If you want access to the tomb, you have to get the key from its steward who lives up the road. There is a deposit, which is refunded upon return. The extra trouble is well worth it to know the monument is well looked after and that you’ll have it to yourself while you explore…

A short passage leads into the vaulted central chamber…

Below you can see the back (south) niche, opposite the entrance. This grave-chamber would receive the direct light of the sun shining down the passage through the open doorway of the tunnel. This particular tomb does not appear to have any significant solstice alignment like the famous Newgrange or Maeshowe passage tombs, but for an interesting (if a little “out there”) discussion of the archaeology and potential alignments of the tomb and its context go here.

The right hand (west) niche. With the exception of “cup marks,” carvings on neolithic sites/monuments is actually very rare. The Boyne Valley/Meath in Ireland seems to be the exception to this rule (at least from my observations) with a majority of the tombs in this region having some sort of carving—indeed, Ireland is said to have the largest collection of megalithic art in Europe, and it is concentrated here. I also find it interesting that this area would much later become the seat of Ireland’s Celtic High Kings at Tara. It seems to have remained a center of cultural and political power for millennia. Coincidence?

Though rare elsewhere, artistic elements seem to be particularly concentrated around right hand niches, which suggests to me that there was a fairly universal plan not only for the construction of passage tombs, but for which members of the society should be interred in which compartments. So, what function did the different niches serve, how was the society organized and divided, and who was placed in each? I have my own working hypothesis…

The left hand (east) niche is free of artistic embellishment:

A seemingly random decorated stone…

Another decorated stone near the passage. This would originally have spanned the passage before the installation of the concrete roof. There is, of course, no way to know the meaning or intention of any abstract art in the absence of the artist, but these wavy lines turn up on a lot of ancient art and sacred art in particular. They remind me a lot of certain visual auras experienced by migraine and seizure sufferers which I can imagine in the Stone Age might have seemed a mystical rather than medical experience. Also, they happen to look cool.

This stone looks like it may have been used to seal the chamber

The edge of the stone above:

You can just make out a very faint abstract “feather” pattern on this stone:

This stone, located to the left of the passage, is said to be the only representation of a human face from the the period. Do you see a “smiley” face? I do not, and I think archaeologists sometimes get carried away with themselves with fanciful interpretations (who doesn’t?), but to each his own, I guess… If anything, I see a one-eyed face, and if this were from a few thousand years later I might have wanted to call this figure “Odin,” but as we have almost no concrete knowledge about beliefs in any deities from this culture/period, that would be a huge stretch.

The “face” stone on the left as you enter, the undecorated left hand burial chamber…

Central and righthand burial chambers…

There is some question as to whether this tomb had a wooden or hide roof, or perhaps never had a roof at all, but was used as an open-air temple (which is not unknown—some Irish tombs (known as court tombs) have forecourts in which rituals were presumably conducted. (I’ll be posting one sometime in the future.) There was a posthole in the center of the space, but no roofing material found, which raises some questions. We really still don’t know how these spaces were used. And maybe they were used differently by people in various places over the vast span of time they were being built. They’re a curiosity, which is part of what makes them so wonderful.

A climb to the top of the mound gives a view of the surrounding countryside and maybe a glimpse of what these ancient people were hoping to hold onto when preparing for the afterlife.