Megaliths of Ireland - Stone Age monuments on the Emerald Isle

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Ireland Is a dream island for people who love antiquity. In terms of the number of archaeological sites, this country will outperform any other in the world, even close in spirit and history to neighboring Scotland. A megaliths on this island are found as often as, for example, supermarkets or gas stations.

In recent decades, Ireland has become famous all over the world thanks to its Celtic culture, for which there is a huge demand - dance, music, ornamental art. Indeed, on this island, despite the strong assimilation by the British, the Celtic Irish language and traditional way of life still have a strong position.

However, the Celtic tribes are not at all the autochthonous population of Ireland. They arrived on the island only at the end of the 1st millennium BC, when a developed civilization had existed on it for many centuries. The memory of her has come down to our times thanks to the huge number of megaliths of various shapes, sizes, combinations and meanings.

We are talking, for example, about menhirs - detached stones that performed both everyday (they marked the boundaries of sites of different families and clans) and sacred function.

There are a huge number of dolmens in Ireland - boxes of stones that served as burial chambers.

Different cromlechs performed different functions in prehistoric Ireland. Ordinary stone circles played the role of sanctuaries and solar calendars. But more complex structures served as all the same tombs in which noble people were buried.

Separately, it is worth highlighting the mounds of stones and earth, poured over the graves. Inside these huge structures, up to hundreds of meters in diameter and up to 40 meters in height, the ancient builders arranged complex systems of labyrinths, very reminiscent of those in the Egyptian pyramids.

But the structures in Ireland are at least a thousand years older than the tombs at Giza. Already in the 5-4 millennia BC, a highly developed civilization with a complex system of internal relationships existed on the island. And it ceased to exist after the arrival of the Celts, in the mythology of which the predecessors are referred to as the tribes of the goddess Danu.