Boyne Valley

The Boyne Valley, County Meath, is home to some of the best-preserved Neolithic sites in the world.

Among the most famous is the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Brú na Bóinne; a spectacular funerary landscape of standing stones, henges, and passage tombs dominated by the monuments of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth.

At over 5,000 years old, these incredible structures contain the largest collection of megalithic art in Western Europe, and were clearly built with a sophisticated knowledge of science and astronomy.

So far, most archaeological investigations into the Boyne Valley’s prehistory have been tightly focussed around these most iconic monuments, all located at the heart of this UNESCO World Heritage Site, within a bend on the northern side of the River Boyne. But now, archaeological attention is spreading south of the river and out across the wider valley, along with a growing recognition that an even bigger story lies buried in the surrounding landscape.

In the last 10 years, large-scale geophysical research by UCD School of Archaeology and the Romano-Germanic Commission (RGK), Frankfurt, along with INSTAR-funded lidar, satellite, and palaeoenvironmental surveys of Brú na Bóinne, has revealed a hidden landscape of henges, timber enclosures, ritual structures, palisades, and the remains of vast wooden monuments. Some of them are so large that they are estimated to have required 14,000 trees to make. The scale of these discoveries is immense and, until recently none of them had been excavated.