Newgrange
— the room the sun visits once a year.
Not only on a wall.
“A passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, raised around 3200 BCE, older than the pyramids at Giza and older than Stonehenge. The mound is a quiet rise above the river, ringed by ninety-seven kerbstones whose spirals have held their lines for five thousand years. For about seventeen minutes around the winter solstice, sunrise threads through a small opening above the doorway and walks the length of the passage to the inner chamber. The rest of the year the chamber holds its dark. A lottery decides who is inside on the morning that matters.
Newgrange, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Newgrange stands on a ridge above a wide bend in the River Boyne in County Meath, about 50 km north of Dublin. The mound is roughly 85 metres across and 13 metres high, and forms the largest of three great passage tombs that make up the Brú na Bóinne archaeological complex, alongside Knowth and Dowth. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. Visitors do not drive to the mound itself; access is by shuttle from the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre at Donore, on the south side of the river. Excavations led by archaeologist Michael J. O'Kelly through the 1960s and 1970s confirmed a construction date of around 3200 BCE.
Ninety-seven decorated kerbstones ring the base of the mound, carved with spirals, lozenges, chevrons, and concentric arcs in the style now called Irish megalithic art. The entrance stone, catalogued as Kerbstone 1, is among the most reproduced pieces of European prehistoric carving; its triple spiral and two interlocking double spirals are divided by a vertical groove that aligns with the passage behind it. The mound itself is built of layered stone and turf, faced on its southern flank with white quartz and rounded granite cobbles. The quartz is not local to County Meath. The nearest source lies in the Wicklow Mountains, more than 70 km to the south, and was carried north by the Neolithic builders to face the entrance.
For about seventeen minutes around sunrise on the winter solstice each December, a narrow beam of light enters a deliberately built opening above the entrance, called the roof box, and travels down the 19-metre passage to fill the inner cruciform chamber. The alignment was rediscovered on the morning of 21 December 1967 by archaeologist Michael J. O'Kelly, who was the first known person to observe it in modern times. The chamber holds the light for the duration of the dawn, then returns to dark for another year. Public access to the chamber on the solstice mornings is awarded by an annual lottery run by the Office of Public Works, which receives tens of thousands of applications for roughly fifty places.