{"id":2605,"date":"2012-04-22T09:38:44","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T13:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2605"},"modified":"2012-04-28T19:02:11","modified_gmt":"2012-04-28T23:02:11","slug":"knocknarae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2605","title":{"rendered":"Knocknarae"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nKnocknarae is a mountain on the west coast of Ireland.\u00a0 Its name means Hill of the Ruler.\u00a0 On top is the cairn of Maeve, Warrior Queen of Connaught, and she still means enough to the Irish people that they have refused to allow her cairn to be opened.\u00a0 I went there because my traveling companion had taken a class in Celtic Mythology, and knew about Queen Maeve.\u00a0 We discovered that there was a \u201cNeolithic graveyard\u201d on the east side of the mountain, so we went hunting.\u00a0 I was interested in Neolithic relics because I had heard about the possibility that Stonehenge was an astronomical computer.
\nThis was one of those synchronicities I look back on with wonder.\u00a0 My senior year at Wellesley I needed to write a paper about a modern building for a class I was taking in Modern Architecture.\u00a0 I was home in Cincinnati, and a friend of my parents had a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.\u00a0 When I asked him, he was very apologetic, but had refused many people and felt he had to refuse me.\u00a0 He referred me to John Garber, who had designed a Church of St. John such that the sunlight fell on the altar at Christmas, Easter, and St. John\u2019s Day which is near the summer solstice.\u00a0 Of course I was intrigued.\u00a0 When I met John Garber our first sentences were \u201cWhere are you at College?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWellesley.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s your major?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAstronomy.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWould you like a job?\u201d\u00a0 He wanted me to come teach astronomy to his children at their summer place on the Damariscotta River.\u00a0 He was interested in Astronomy because he had read Gerald Hawkins’ first article on Stonehenge, which had just appeared.\u00a0 John said\u00a0 he was interested in the Neolithic because that was when humans had settled down, and it was the beginning of architecture, agriculture, and astronomy.\u00a0 I had a great time that summer, and it started me on the path to Archeoastronomy.
\nSo when I stood at the dolmen that was east of Knocknarae, I already had a suspicion that the neolithic people were more than ignorant savages.\u00a0 Dol-men means Table-stone in Gaellic, and a Dolmen is a structure with several (usually five) uprights holding a capstone.\u00a0 This creates a chamber, and many of them were used for burial.\u00a0 Between grave robbers and erosion, the earth mound that once covered them is long gone.\u00a0 I looked at this balanced construction of stones inside a circle of stones, not on top of a gentle knoll but just over the height toward the mountain.\u00a0 The capstone is trapezoidal, Knocknarae is trapezoidal, Maeve\u2019s Cairn is trapezoidal, on the right, out of the picture is another flat-topped mountain.\u00a0 Somehow the dolmen focussed the whole landscape, brought it together in a single magic shape, a huge piece of sculpture bigger than a cathedral.\u00a0 I decided that this was the greatest piece of sculpture I had ever seen.\u00a0 Since then I\u2019ve been to London, Paris, Florence, and Athens, and still haven\u2019t seen anything to equal it.
\nIt turned my world upside-down.\u00a0 I could no longer imagine that we \u201cmodern\u201d humans had progressed since the Neolithic.\u00a0 Considering the mess we are making of the world, that\u2019s more true than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Knocknarae is a mountain on the west coast of Ireland.\u00a0 Its name means Hill of the Ruler.\u00a0 On top is the cairn of Maeve, Warrior Queen of Connaught, and she still means enough to the Irish people that they have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}