Loughcrew At Sunrise Surprise

First off - some news. My new book is now back from the printers and I'll shortly have Monu-Mental About Prehistoric Antrim available in my shop. It looks great and I'm very happy with it.

As I mentioned before, Ken Williams wanted to go up to Loughcrew to check out one of Martin Brennan's alignment predictions for Cairn H. This is an unusual alignment with a late October sunrise that possibly doesn't mean anything, but it has been suggested that it may have served as an early warning for the forthcoming winter solstice.

Cairn H, like many of the other cairns, has no roof, so Ken suggested taking a groundsheet up and covering the passage to recreate the effect. This worked fantastically well and we witnessed a very moving effect. I think we may have actually have been a few days late, but we did see the sun hit the rear wall and then light up the nicely carved threshhold stone to the north chamber. The heavily carved orthostat in the passage was also nicely lit.

After mooching around the hill and revisiting some of the other cairns we headed over to the other hill to see some recently rediscovered rock art.

After that we went down to the stone circle in the valley below. I've looked down on this from the hilltops many times, but never managed to get down to it. We stumbled around for a while looking for the rock art panel next to the circle. Some had said that it was moved to the National Museum while others said it's by the circle. Eventually we found it - inside the stone circle! And it's beautiful.

All in all, this was a great day.