Kilkenny’s Knockroe Passage Tomb is to be featured in a new TG4 documentary.
‘Rún na Bóinne’ sees journalist and folklorist Seán Mac an tSíthigh and a team of leading international scientists undertake a quest to uncover the location of a long suspected second chamber at Newgrange, Co. Meath, which takes them to south Kilkenny.
Producers say “On slopes above the Lingaun River, lie the skeletal, neolithic remains of Knockroe. Like the Boyne valley monuments, it was built around 5000 years ago. And it was here during excavations in the 1990s that archaeologist Prof. Muiris O’Sullivan and his team made an exciting discovery. Although smaller, Knockroe is remarkably similar to Newgrange as it aligns to the winter solstice rising sun. But it also contains a second chamber aligned to the winter solstice setting sun”.
“Knockroe is great in that you can clearly see the cairns stones exposed in the landscape.” says Neal Boyle, the director and producer of the documentary. “It’s like the open mechanism of an ancient watch or clock and we can see how it worked. When you think about how the builders had to observe and track the sun over extended periods of time in order to design these alignments into the cairns, you start to think about our ancestors in a different way. But does Knockroe give us a clue as to where we should look for a second chamber at Newgrange?”
You can watch what happens on TG4 from 9:30pm on 20th December with a repeat at 11:35pm on December 23rd – here’s a snippet:
