21/12/2022
HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE!
It's just gone midnight here in Ireland. Sunrise is due at 08:44 and because it's going to be the shortest day of the year, up and down the country people will gather at ancient prehistoric sites waiting for the sun to come up and align itself with stones carefully placed by our ancestors.
The monument in this photograph is called Newgrange. It was built here in County Meath’s Boyne Valley about 5,200 years ago (3,200 B.C.), making it older than both Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza. Above the passage entrance there’s a small opening and at sunrise today a shaft of sunlight will enter the chamber (weather conditions permitting), dramatically illuminating the passage. In Neolithic culture the Winter Solstice marked the start of the New Year. It was a sign of nature’s rebirth and promised renewed life to crops, animals and humans. It also served as a powerful symbol of the inevitable victory of life over death, promising new life to the spirits of the dead. To experience the phenomenon here at Newgrange you would have had to enter a lottery in September. Each year, from the thousands that enter, fifty are chosen, each of whom can bring a guest.
So Happy Winter Solstice, my Northern Hemisphere friends! From today our nights start getting shorter and our days longer and brighter, and if that's not a cause for celebration I don't know what is! 🥳😃🥰
(M) 💚
Pic. Aidan Curry
https://www.facebook.com/AidanCurranPhotography
