DECEMBER 21st, the shortest day of the year, celebrates a new dawn in the Irish lunar calendar at the 5,200-year-old Stone Age site at Newgrange Passage Grave in Co Meath, some 500 years older than the Egyptian pyramids. As people gathered to witness this extraordinary event, I passed the site travelling to the East Galway Foxhounds meet at Kilconnell in Co Galway. It was dawn at 8.58am, and at dawn on this day once a year, a shaft of light from the rising sun accurately penetrates the small light box over the entrance door and widens along the 19-metre passage lighting up the three inner chambers as the sun gets higher. It heralds the Winter Equinox, an event that everybody should experience once in one’s lifetime.

New Dawn in East Galway