By Peter Makem
In my lifetime, Ireland has never experienced such a hot blast of summer. Not so long ago in February last, we had the Beast from the East, an arrival of frozen wind direct from Siberia which lowered temperatures into a coldness we could scarcely cope with, and in the months afterward the annual lamentations arose of the long and lingering winter that had now taken the month of May into its ever-encroaching empire. In fact, there is an old Irish saying — “Cast not a clout until May is out.” — that is, don’t take off your sweater until May is over. Then suddenly, the Beast from the East was replaced by its opposite number, the Holy Tara from the Sahara. The usual mild south westerlies from the Atlantic were somehow kept far off the Irish coast and any semblance of a north wind from the Arctic regions was fended off by the jet stream.
Into this rare vacuum, the Mediterranean — itself heated by North Africa — sped into Ireland around the summer solstice and settled its soaring temperatures there four weeks in a row. The thermometer often read 32 degrees C, the hottest days on record.
As with all vagaries of the weather, Ireland is never prepared. We are not long out of the days of the massive floods, of massive tides and Atlantic surges along the west coast with the destruction of coastal villages. The heat was at times equal to anywhere in Europe, and all around were sighs of thanks and elation — that if this represents what is called global warming, then keep it coming. The beaches became crowded like scenes from the Costa del Sol in Spain, from Tenerife.
We were as a people whose Island had floated down toward Gibraltar, and the weather forecasters assured us that the heat would go on and on. This was indeed a very rare Ireland.
But then I noticed something out in the back garden. The grass had stopped growing. The usual lush green had turned into a semi-desert brown. My neighbor’s garden was the same. I went for one of my trips up into the Mourne Mountains and on approaching Spelga Dam Reservoir saw hundreds of visitors gathered for picnics and walks in the blissful scenery.
But I quickly noticed something else. The water level in the dam was way, way down far lower than I had ever seen before, and crowds were walking along old pathways and bridges that had been submerged for over a century as if on some pilgrimage into a lost land. Then away above me, usual multiplicity of streams that fed the reservoir from the higher mountain were all bone dry.
The hot weather was topping the news every day, but was getting an ever-growing serious side that water was being rationed, that things were reaching panic levels, warnings made about people filling children’s garden swimming pools, washing their cars, filling baths instead of taking showers, using garden hoses and so on.
But this was all eclipsed by the shouts and cries from the farming community that the crops needed water, that things were becoming critical. With the farming community, the sweat of the heat was merging with the sweat of the panic.
As the normal green landscape was darkening all over and growth coming to a halt, I imagined enraged farmers shaking their fists at the heavens, shaking pitchforks at the unchanging cloudless skies, shouting betrayal, of being forgotten, reminding whoever might be listening up there of the blight, of the great faithlessness of past times.
“We were as a people whose Island had floated down toward Gibraltar…”
Then something else happened. A friend of my brother who owns a drone machine offered to bring it out to the top of our land on Mullyard Hill to scan the landscape from 300 feet higher and see what the view might be. We prided ourselves on being able to see eleven counties and sure enough, as the drone began its circling scan we could see places never sighted before.
But this was not all. We noticed something else. The parched fields dried up by the sun revealed contours on the ground never before seen and there, in front of our eyes, in the pictures taken by the drone, were the circular rims of two forts — pronounced locally as forths — that is, circular mounds used as defensive places in early times. They appeared as revelations out of maybe a thousand years of invisibility, lost, forgotten, concealed after being leveled and plowed over down the ages.
And now from this height, and out of the parched land, their presence manifests itself in a manner no eyes had seen before, awakened into life by the summer heat.
The very next day, I opened an Irish newspaper and was astonished to discover that something similar but of even greater import had been discovered near Newgrange. A local historian was flying a drone over the Boyne valley when he discovered a previously unknown circular enclosure close to the Neolithic passage tomb Newgrange. Again, the landscape clarity was only made possible by drought conditions caused by the heat wave.
Almost immediately, the Minister for Heritage Josepha Madigan ordered a full aerial survey of this celebrated World Heritage Site, the famous Brú na Bóinne prehistoric complex in County Meath describing the scale of the find as “simply unparalleled.” She said the unusual ground conditions during the prolonged dry spell has thrown up a rare opportunity to “uncover further secrets held in our landscape.” (Brú na Bóinne means “mansion of the Boyne.”)
A reconnaissance quickly carried out by archaeologists from the National Monuments Service revealed an array of archaeological features in the vicinity across the River Boyne floodplain south of the Newgrange passage tomb.
It is probable that the fresh archaeological discoveries date to the Neolithic Period around 5,000 years ago, and can only enhance the sacredness of this place as the ultimate source of the mysteries of Ireland. Vastly excited by the fresh assertions rising out of the burnished earth, officials have started to work on mapping out the discoveries in an attempt to understand their relationship to each other and the many other monuments already known in the area.
As everybody already knows, Brú na Bóinne contains one of the world’s most important prehistoric landscapes, and is dominated by the three large passage tombs, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. These precede the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by a thousand years and Knowth contains the largest assemblage of megalithic art in Western Europe. And for the most of those five thousand years the new discoveries lay in a tomb of their own until, in the fullness of time, in July of 2018, a heat wave melted their covering and called them out from the dead.