End of Summer

I wrote this last week, but only now had time to publish it...

Mounds at Knowth with passage tombs

Sorry for not writing this long. It has been a very busy Summer with lots of trips. Until last the previous week Anika was here and we visited Newgrange and Knowth a few weeks ago. The whole area is a UNESCO world heritage site. These are 5,200 year-old burial mounds. Older than the Egyptian pyramids and fairly sophisticated. Depending on the mound, they are aligned with the Summer or Winter solstice. At Newgrange there is a lottery for about twenty people to be inside the mound on one of the mornings around December 21st. For a few minutes the passage aligns with the rising sun and the light reaches into the heart of the mound, illuminating the spot where five millennia ago the cremated remains of people who had died were presented to the sun to allow passage into the afterlife.

Although there are stones with markings from that time, nobody really knows what these people believed or why they built the mounds. They did a good job, though. No rain water has penetrated the tombs for thousands of years. That, in spite of many peoples coming afterwards and using the mounds for their own purposes. Houses, moats, and whole castles were built on them. Sometimes escape tunnels and places to hide were dug. But overall the mounds have survived very well.
The tours for the two main sites leaving the visitor center at Bru na Boynne are very interesting. You can see some more pictures on my picasa page.

On Sunday I went running. I have been doing it, but my training schedule had to bend and twist quite a bit to accommodate travel and weather conditions. My goal is to run the Dublin Marathon at the end of October. Sunday I was supposed to go for twenty miles, which I did, but I had to walk the last three. As I was dragging myself defeated out of Phoenix park, an old lady walked on the path toward me. Just as we were crossing each other she turns toward me and asks "Did you win the race today?"
I was still trying to figure out why I hadn't been able to finish my run and just stared at her. She said "There was a race, you know, here in the park this morning." I think there had been a 10k earlier in the day, so I finally said that I had not participated in the race. As soon as she heard me say that she told me "Of course you wouldn't. You are not Irish." and walked off. The tone of her voice clearly indicated that only an Irish could participate in or win this race ;-)
Looking at the race results, a Scotsman won the race, which may be close enough to Irish for the old lady.  Looking down the list, it does seem there are very few non-locals, although there is a chance: on rank 142 is an "unknown male".