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Nearly 50 years ago, archaeologists began excavating at Knowth near Newgrange – and the site has yet to give up all its secrets, writes Claire O’Connell in the Irish Times. The first day we went in, we went up the passage. When we got in towards the end, the passage became difficult, but there seemed to be a void at the top and I crawled up with a flashlight and walked until I came to the end of the passage. I flashed the lamp around and saw this massive void. I flashed the lamp upwards and I could see a massive roof, which was nearly 20 feet in height.

In my great excitement I jumped down six or seven feet, and to my amazement I found that what I had jumped into was a massive cruciform chamber. There was an astonishing amount of art and a magnificent stone basin in the right-hand recess.

Forty years ago, the bearer of the flashlight, archaeologist George Eogan, became the first person in centuries to see the underground passage tomb at Knowth in Meath, part of Brú na Bóinne (Bend of the Boyne), now a Unesco World Heritage site.

A year earlier, in 1967, the Knowth excavation had uncovered a smaller underground passage leading in from the western face of the megalithic mound, but this larger east-side tomb surpassed it, recalls Eogan, a professor of archaeology at University College Dublin.

The art has survived millennia that saw great changes at Knowth. The site underwent a revamp around the eighth century AD when it became a protected settlement, the royal residence for the Brega kingdom, and some of the smaller satellite tombs were destroyed.

Read the full story at the Irish Times.

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