Ancient Ireland Explored

[Music] in the summer of 2019 means and friends went on a road trip to explore Ireland we explored some of the famous touristy spots the beautiful scenery the rugged coastline and of course we had to experience the nightlife we camped the majority of the time spent most nights enjoying the festivities and I managed to wangle a few megalithic sites into the trip as well [Music] [Applause] okay hello and I'm stood in front of a combination of a Dolman and a stone circle we're in Island we were about to start a megalithic roadtrip going all over the country sharing different standing stones and all the sights that they've got on this beautiful island as I said this is a dolmen stone circle combination it's one of about 60 sites we've just done a walk around and then we've seen ones like 52 53 54 this is number seven of the 60 that are still remaining they think that there was probably a lot more they know of at least 20 that were destroyed in the last few hundred years by farmers and all of our sort of modern day activities and there's some really interesting facts about some of these different tombs they call them here they have found at one of these thirty kilos of remains of burnt bones and burnt bodies basically so that's a pretty interesting point there was a view point at the top there where you are supposed to be able to see and thirty of these tombs even some of them are positioned on top of the hills at surrounding here so that's also a really interesting fact but one of the things that I've noticed from all these trips around the world is how sometimes is dolmen and these megalithic sites are just out in the middle of nowhere and there's nothing for miles and miles around and then you come places and you get clusters of them so this fields of dolmen in well plenty of places Germany Jordan Israel like there pretty much all over the world these clusters of dolmen and also they're just positioned on their own as well all over the world so why the megalithic builders would have suddenly decided to put so many close together and God knows but it's called the megalithic cemetery as I said it's Karrimor not far from Sligo oh I didn't mention there there's alignments here as well there's certain tombs of these line up with different hills and different points around the landscape in different points of the year you know solstices and one of them was lined up with one of the pagan festival that goth forget which one but again as pretty interesting point so yes beautiful day let's hope we have more weather like this we've had some pretty shocking weather so far on island hence buying this t-shirt that's basically says all of the seasons is just paying it down in Ireland we've had plenty of rain but the structures have very specific positioning and it is the structure known as Giants grave that aligns with the top of mountains at specific times of the year and certain Celtic dates such as salmon though it must be said that the entire site has undergone a lot of restoration due to aging and damage done particularly from quarrying in the 19th century Karrimor is one of the oldest and largest tomb complexes in ireland constructed from two different types of rock one crystalline and another more chalky in nature the ruins are believed to be at least seven thousand years old with the oldest estimated to have been built around 5400 BC and it is unknown what was there before the Ice Age it is believed the burial remains found could have been placed there thousands of years after the site was built with bones discovered in the Giants grave and cremated remains found in the surrounding satellite tombs the complex shares a legend with another site that we visit later on in the film the legend states that there was a witch who flew over the area with an apron full of stones and she accidentally dropped them scattering them across the region alternative researchers believe the complex is like a temple that utilizes cosmic and earth energies and there were certainly a lot of energy slapping us in the face of our next site yeah you go alright I'm gonna have to hold the microphone so we are in a place called The Burren it's like a natural Nature Reserve kind of area and you get a lot of this kind of erosion here there's a lot of lime stones a big limestone plateau and there's all these Greeks forming in it and lots of erosion those are famous for hundreds of Darwin and this is the most popular and a really beautiful one behind us and obviously the weather is at ferocious the wind's coming in like this so I would like to play a tribute to these guys actually having the balls help me out with this because this is really atrocious conditions and well done guys thank you not much to say about this one it looks really beautiful I wish the weather wasn't like this like a sculpture up against the lovely countryside as I've said a few sights before they found 33 sets of remains here bones basically and they think that that was they were placed there over a 600 year period and that they were probably moved from other locations around the area and that's quite interesting about this one it's the most famous there's a loads of people coming here and it's really beautiful and if the way there wasn't so rubbish I will be taking loads of photos of this but I honestly think it's time for us to get back in the car thank you and good night this is the best-known and most widely photograph of the approximately 170 dolmens in ireland next like we visit a rather special specimen on the other side of the country okay so we're in browns Hill Dolman not far from Carlo on the east coast of Ireland now I've wanted to come to this Dolman for about ten years I've been talking about this in certain videos of mine and the reason it interests me so much is because of this massive capstone on top it's supposed to be or it was known as the biggest in Europe is 150 tonnes I went to one in Spain and saw DOM and Domingo which has got a capstone there's 180 tonnes but that's covered over with earth and it's called a passage grave and this is a portal Dolman because it's freestanding and you there's nothing over the top of it you can see it's definitely balancing on some author stats or the upright stones and it's slanting quite a lot you'll be able to see from here the thickness of this capstone is pretty impressive it's probably 2 meters in certain parts I think and the thing that's interesting is it's the density of the rock this is granite so you know just how they would have moved this really heavy stone using logs and rope and balancing on top of that you know this is hard for me to believe that's for sure it's a really cool place to spend some time yeah we were speaking to a local lady we met here and she said that she one time felt energies and when she was sat inside it so it's very interesting because lots of people online are saying very similar things when they come to these sites they feel a connection to other realms and that kind of thing oh yeah I'm gonna go inside not sure if I'll feel anything so a lot of crystal in these rocks I've got a geologist friend who's holding the camera right now and he says that this would have a high level of crystals in this rock due to the way it has formed he was giving me the whole spiel about metamorphic rock and and how its formed on the pressure and heat but again a lot of crystals in these rocks is something I noticed so many of these sites around the world I've shown in loads of my films like lines of crystal going through minis and dolmen and stone circles as well alright so we have come as about five miles from Cork on the other side of the river and Cork harbour is just up here if you follow this estuary down we've come here to show a dolmen on the other side of the river there you can probably just about see a white rock looks like it's a couple of tonnes and that is the capstone of a dolmen obviously the tides come in and we're not gonna bother walking across there as we're just gonna have to see what we see from here it does look like there is a larger structure maybe it's a massive sort of portal dolmen or something because there are some rocks behind it and they look like they're kind of close together and forming some kind of structure but as I said we're not gonna bother wading across we just wanted to show this because these sites generally aren't close to the coast and certainly I've never seen any on what is basically a riverbed so I thought this one was quite interesting to show you and a rather cool little sided thing but on to the next there is another large dome not far from where Stalin is a beautiful example of the portal dolmen with a huge capstone at least four meters in length this type of dolmen is found not only all over Ireland but also all over the world with an estimated 90 to $100,000 on the surface of the planet the largest is found in South Korea with a capstone estimated to weigh more than 300 tons and amazingly there are more than 30,000 dolmen in the two Koreas combined [Music] another structural style of dolmen is called a passage grave which is more like a building than a sculpture a building that is often but not always found in case within a mound so we are now in where are we we're about thirty kilometres from Limerick south of the city of Limerick and we've come to a place called longer lock girl there are quite a few megalithic sites all in a sort of one square kilometre area this being dolmen or a tomb is really interesting actually I wasn't expecting you I didn't know much about this as I turned up but we've read the sign and it seems to have been used over the ages they found the remains of some pottery and there was eight adult bodies and four children and skeletons found inside and funnily enough they weren't cremated they've also found cremated remains when they found all the bones in the dolmen they were scattered all over the place so they think they've been disturbed it says on the sign that there a woman used to live in this in the early 1800s a woman lived in here anything that maybe she scattered the bones around but I've made the point in my videos before how these sites could have been used at many stages over you know over our history and that we are dating to a particular point in that history for example I think they say the pottery remains are two-and-a-half thousand BC or from that age but you know that might not have been the builders of this site that's really cool there's about five cap stones on top here - sort of like layers to the dolmen as this layer and then this one here so in total there's probably about 30 or 40 stones and here and also you'll probably be able to see around the outside there's a lot of other megalithic blocks as well almost looks like this was a gigantic mound of some kind or maybe another structure we to know this interesting actually the the stone that's used seems to be a little bit different to a lot of the megaliths in Ireland and this is a lot more porous it seems to be eroding quite well and there's even some stones either side that have got holes right the way through reminds me of the rollright stones in England actually because that's quite striking how stones are more or less sort of dissolving but yeah five cap stones on top this one here was probably the biggest and I would say that's got to be at least sort of three or four tonnes and again how they dragged these and built these structures in their simple caveman ways I've got no idea oh alright so next to that big wedge tomb is Ireland's biggest stone circle this is where we are now and is absolutely paying it down so I'm kind of trying to hide from the rain a little bit as is George my trusted cameraman here I want to show how big it is it's 46 meters in diameter and I'm not sure how many stones there are there's probably at least a hundred here all ranging in different sizes you can see on this side in the background here there's some small ones and then the biggest one is funnily enough just over here and it's probably I'm gonna guess that that's around 15 tonnes it's a massive stone you got over there so they really vary in size from sort of those that are about half of me at all and probably quarter of a ton to those that are probably three and a half four meters tall it's also on this stone over here loads of people are putting like best wishes and coins and gifts it looks like there's some crystals and it's even a like a little harmonica which is funny and they've done some excavation here so they found hundreds of bits of Flint's and I think they found some charcoaled remains and they've used that to date this area again is part of a complex that is three stone circles there some standing stones as well and as that wedge tomb or the portal dolmen that we saw and there's some villages and ancient settlement says stories of fairies and a city that was buried by the lake as well so there's all sorts of mythology and stories associated with this region and the tourist information says six thousand years of living history and all that so I think there's a big history in this area and as I said it's absolutely peeing it down so I think we're gonna carry on and find some other interesting megalithic sites stone circles are another type of megalithic site found all over the world particularly in Western Europe but also in places such as India Japan the USA in South Africa there are around 200 stone circles found in Ireland but the vast majority in the southwest in County Cork which is where we visited our next site okay so this is drum big stone circle it's actually quite a famous stone circle for island and we've had loads of visitors come and we basically camped over there last night and all last night and this morning they started early for tons and tons of visitors that's really popular and we're about an hour's drive west of Cork or very close to Skibbereen basically right on the south coast of Ireland there you can see a stone circle with 17 stones and the front two here are known as the portal stones these are the biggest in the stone circle and it's said to be the entrance to it as well and one really interesting fact similar to Stonehenge is that off in that direction there on December the 21st you can see the Sun setting so it lines up for the winter solstice it lines up with this recumbent stone you can probably see through there that there is a stone lying down and now this is called a recumbent stone circle for that reason because you have this recumbent stone and it's something that I've seen in Aberdeen actually in Scotland in Aberdeen show they have roughly a hundred of these recumbent stone circles they say that their calendars although I've questioned that in a video that I made because I don't know why they would have so many calendars in such a small area and then none around the rest of the country on the sign it says that these are the two tallest stones which is certainly true but then it says that the stones as they lead round towards this recumbent stone and gets smaller but actually they kind of get smaller and there's a bigger one here and I'm not sure why they say that on that sign to be honest with you they did some excavating and they found five fire pits in the center here and they found remains as well I think there was a Avars that was covered in ash which was the the burial remains of the body of some kind they dated that - I think it's 1100 - 800 BC so I would suggest that whoever was doing that burial ceremony wasn't necessarily the builders of the stone circle as I said before my videos it's it's likely that when these stone circles were built future generations came along and use these sites so yeah this is the recumbent stone right next to it is a really interesting one because again in the loads of my videos from around the world I've said how a lot of these stones have a high crystal content and this one's got lines of quartz going right through it in particular there's a really big strip there and on the other side here there's a massive line of quartz crystal and I'm not gonna go into it again but I've talked about the piezoelectric effect and how this could be being used to maybe manipulate or absorb or use in some way there ley line energies that that these stone circles and all these megalithic sites are often placed on off in this direction you will be able to see lo que a field of Wrath 50 stones all these just random stones lying around and then you've got the two structures off in the distance there this one off on the right hand side here they call them Hut's and so there's it looks like actually two kind of stone circles at the moment and there's one that's probably about three metres across and another that's four or five and then they just say I think that they were they were dwelling of some kind and then this one here is a little bit more interesting you've got again like there's a ring of stones and then within that there is a well and a rectangular kind of chamber the way they found remains again and they say they used to cook meat in there and then use the world for cooking and it also has like a little stream running out of it as well which is pretty interesting but I'm not sure exactly what was going on with this structure again maybe this was used at a later date they just sort of you know found the stone circle here and then they came along and built those but it's a really interesting site I can see why there's got so many visitors come here it's really cool the view is fantastic is a really beautiful place to camp last night and surrounded by cows and really very peaceful I'm often asked how easy it is to find the site's we visit most of the time it's not too difficult but not too far from drum bag there is another type of site that took us far too long to find right sideways is this defined that's an outtake this is a find already so behind me here is it's a megalithic structure that I quite like actually I don't know why I think it's the least common of the megalithic sites it's a stone row obviously a row of stones I've seen them in places like Portugal I filmed a few Germany also and they found mainly in the UK in this little Southwest part of England in the Dartmoor National Park there's loads of these and often leading up to a stone circle Kalen ish as well and Avebury you've got these rows where there's actually two lines of them leading up to a stone circle and but then you also get just lines like this there's five of these stones I'm not sure if there would have been more originally and but for the moment here we've just got this these five out in this beautiful scenery we're right in the southwest of Ireland now and there's loads of mountains and cliffs and and beautiful woodland and here we have the five stones there's a quartz crystal this one here in particular my geologist friend has told me that and is that is chock-a-block full of court we've seen in all these megalithic sites a lot of them they found little chars little bits of Flint around scattered around the bottom here and they say really interestingly enough on the sign this is pointing to the Northeast and it points towards a I played on the horizon where the moon reaches the most northerly point in its 18.6 year cycle so the moon obviously sets in different places on the horizon and as I said in this 18 point six year cycle this is pointing right to the most northerly point which I find pretty interesting because a lot of these sites are aligned in terms of you know solstices and sun setting and there's loads of flies here and yeah so these ones look a little bit like they've been shaped these all look like they've got cuts on them really these look like massive choc ices these are like cuboid or rectangular or whatever you want to call it and but they look like they're pretty flat surfaces which is again something I saw in some of the dolmen in Germany and stone circle in Germany as well and they don't have that natural sort of Boulder looking so if it's to them yeah it's cool it's a really cool beautiful place and a very rare megalithic site and so this would probably be the only one we see in the film I wanted to just show this because it is one of the megalithic structures that you find around the world but we're in an area where there are tons and tons of megaliths circles manie's dolmen so we're gonna go and find a few more there are indeed many sites in the area so many we would need weeks to explore them although we did visit one last Munir before leaving the area which seemed to really help my hangover this is Valley crow vein mania it's pretty big 17 foot it's pretty interesting and again in the beautiful location right on the coast these standing stones again when you look at all these sites they're not so interesting when you just come and see one it's when you start to piece them all together and there are hundreds over Ireland and the UK and they found all over the world this one's pretty cool because it's got something I haven't seen before a few things I've seen before you never really it stones at the bottom is usually just sticking out the ground here we've got a like base to this structure there's probably five stones at the bottom here we've got what looks like finger marks basically and they're going all the way up the stone no we're not sure if this is some kind of evidence of how they cut it because this looks pretty flat this surface here is really really flat it could be natural obviously but with these marks here that suggests that maybe this was done on purpose on this side also is pretty interesting because you've got sin it's almost like it's half finished you've got half of it is very flat like this and the rest is much more as you imagine a rock would look you know not flat at all and as I said pretty big again it's just as I say it's when you look at them and how they could all be linked on a grid system that they've become pretty interesting these things in our films we have talked extensively about telluric energies and the ley lines that run all over the world forming a grid this field of research began when Sir Alfred Watkins made his observations along with some Michaels ley lines but since then his research has been added to and we now have a more extensive idea of the extent of these lines and where they flow the Bekaa Hagen's grid is a recent attempt to map these lines but we think it will be a lot more complicated when more discoveries have been made to this day we are still discovering some of the mathematical relationships both at these sites and between them the work of Howard Crowe hers for example shows the deliberate positioning of the stones and the alignments of Carnac and other sites in Brittany surrounding them Hugh Newman has done some great work regarding the distances between Giza the planets prime meridian and various ancient and sacred sites in his book you can find many harmonic distances between these sites as well as religiously significant sites such as Canterbury the heart of the Church of England which is 30 degrees west of Giza he also gives details of latitudinal harmonics for example the Phoebe's temple in Egypt has two sevenths of the distance between the equator and the North Pole and Avery sits four-sevenths between the two he also shows one degree between the Greek sites of Delphi the donor and Delos which lie along the Apollo's and Michael's ley line a line that leads to Ireland and connects to the boiler' Valley in our final collection of sites Newgrange is one of Ireland's most popular attractions luring around two hundred thousand visitors each year most of which seem to be there on the day we visited they come to see one of the best and largest examples of a passage grave in Western Europe although in recent years archaeologists have begun to consider the monument as an ancient temple a place of astrological spiritual religious and ceremonial importance according to carbon dating Newgrange was constructed around 3200 BC at least 600 years before the Giza pyramids and a thousand years before Stonehenge it is believed Newgrange was built by a farming community that prospered on the rich lands of the Pointer Valley built during an age when allegedly the only building tools available were made from stone wood antlers or bones it is built with 200,000 tons of alternating layers of earth and stone sourced from the local vicinity it is unknown how the largest stones were brought to the site although it's believed some of the gray wax stone blocks were bought from a beach 20 kilometres away some say it took an estimated 30 years using a workforce of approximately 300 people suggesting a well-organized society with groups with specialized skill sets they grooved the top surface of the passage roof stones and built the roof to be waterproof the Korbel construction still hasn't leaked in 5000 years not easy considering the amount of rain in Ireland and all without using any mortar Newgrange was rediscovered at the end of the 1600s so there has been significant damage and reconstruction done during that time although not on the inner chambers most of the restoration is controversial among the archaeological community in particular with regard to the huge quartz wall at the front of the monument Newgrange is a large circular mound 85 meters in diameter in 13 and 1/2 meters tall with a 19 meter long passageway leading to a large central chamber with three smaller chambers leading off from it the passage stones averaged around one and a half meters in height and many are decorated with carvings the mound is actually a kidney shape and around the back there is a section where the perimeter of the noun doesn't connect almost as if it was a spiral itself it is ringed by 97 large curb stones some of which are also engraved with circles spirals arcs and Chevron's symbols known collectively as megalithic arts spirals such as these are found in numerous places around the world in places such as the USA Norway Croatia and Namibia and many more these intricate and beautiful iron carve stones form the densest collection of megalithic artwork on the planet resulting in Newgrange in the surrounding mounds being designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO one of the most famous examples of our Newgrange is the triple spiral that has come to symbolize ancient Ireland the meaning of the artwork is up for debate some say it's purely decorative whilst others believe they have a more symbolic purpose because some of the carvings were in places that would not have been visible both burnt and unburned human bones from at least two individuals were found inside the passage although strangely much of their skeletons were missing and what was left had been scattered throughout the structure artifacts such as marbles pendants beads and a bone chisel have been found and are considered by mainstream archaeologists to be grave goods deposited alongside the bodies inside the passage evidence has shown that Newgrange was used over a thousand year period and combined with the discovery of only partial remains and astronomical alignments Dow is cast on the theory suggesting they were tombs on the winter solstice the light of the Rising Sun enters through an opening above the passage entrance illuminating the inner chamber for just 17 minutes the alignment is very precise and is thought to have been used to determine the exact day of the solstice marking the beginning of the new year other alignments that the neighboring sites have also been found and although they are less precise the Newgrange is still strengthens the case for the structures being giant calendars there are numerous myths and legends associated with Newgrange and one interesting finding was the Roman coins and pendants that were still being found in the 1960s during excavations less than two kilometers away is the site of not consisting of a large mound slightly smaller than that found at Newgrange and 17 smaller satellite tombs the mound contains two passages placed along an east-west line suggesting an astronomical alignment at the equinoxes although due to the rigors of restoration and destruction the alignments do not occur today amazingly over 200 decorated stones were found during excavations with the majority carved on 127 curb stones which encircle the mound you can clearly see numerous spirals and other typical symbols of the area North contains more than a third of the total number of examples of megalithic art in Western Europe and the information signs at the site state that the structure has been used throughout its history right so we have come away from the hustle and bustle of all those tour buses newgrange's are probably about two kilometers I guess you can see it off in the distance there and we've come to another site which is very similar to Newgrange they say anyway is similar in size this was actually a little bit bigger but this hasn't been reconstructed I think there is there's over a hundred of the the curb stones around the outside and I think there's only 97 there so this one is slightly bigger I would say slightly taller as well and it's similar in size to Silbury Hill that was in that's in Avery so we've come here for just a little look around and it's obviously much more peaceful and you'll be able to see down in this area here there's this massive cavity and we're not sure what's going on with this maybe it's collapsed or something maybe there was a big sort of chamber under there and but we're just guessing when it comes to that we've seen I think it's the westerly end there are two entrances it's really cold inside when you stand that the entrance there you can't get in because they've put a gate on but when you stand there you can feel like freezing air coming out like it was an ice cave or something and here there is one spiral on an entrance stone to the to the main entrance to what I think would have been two tombs and at Newgrange there is an entrance stone with lots of spirals on it and there was only one tomb over there all of these cans in this area have certain myths associated with them and this one was supposed to have been built because a king ordered a tower to be built to the heavens and then they stopped building because he slept with his sister or something like that I'm not fully familiar with the whole myth but there's certainly a lot of mythology with these sites these cans in this area and a lot of the sites all over Ireland as well there's been a beautiful beautiful tour we've seen a lot of all the different sites we've seen the dome and the standing stones cans stone rows and circles so we've had a really good time it's absolutely smothered in history just behind Tom here who's holding the camera you can see the ruins of a church and then it's also a castle there and that's a common thing we've just been coming across ruins all over the place we've camped next to a few of them which is really cool yes so this island is rich in history it's just the you know got the Celts and the pagans and all these megalithic sites and castles and churches and it's a really great place to come and visit and I think we would all highly recommend it other people are bloody lovely the people are glorious we've had so much fun with people in pubs and just they're so friendly they've got a really good sense of humor about them and out of all the 87 countries I've been to I would say that the Irish are the friendliest that I've come across by quite a long way as well they make looking the keys in your car and easy experience yeah some plonk of lock the keys in the car and they want me yeah so come to Ireland come and see some of their amazing sights [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Modern Explorers

Views: 18,633

Keywords: Megalith, megalithic, stone circle, dolmen, stone row, standing stone, menhir, cairn, passage grave, tomb, ancient aliens, ancient civilisation, history, Stonehenge, pyarmids, Brownshill, Newgrange, The Burren, Drombeg, Irish mythology

Id: UeKA2bjT0sk

Length: 34min 2sec (2042 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019