Down to the last day in Ireland. An AirBNB overnight in Belfast with a delightful French host set up a small drive along the coast before venturing in for a long visit to the monastic sites of Newgrange & Knowth; another attraction, free once you have the OPW card.
The visitors centre is actually quite a distance from the sites themselves, but you can only access the sites from attending the visitors centre, getting on one of their buses, and being taken to the sites.
Skipped the line and registered for the 3 hour tour of both sites, soon to discover, what felt like about an hour of that time is wasted being transported out to Newgrange, back to the centre, to head back to a similar area to visit Knowth, to return to the visitor centre. Logic doesn’t enter into it. And consequently, you feel rushed at the sites to return to the bus.
Newgrange is a deeply spiritual site, and after the guide escorts you around, you are left for barely a few minutes for photo op and or, as many did, to stand upon mound, meditate and become one with the earth energy.
Knowth is larger, and you can walk further into the mound to the “meeting spot”. They don’t permit photos inside the mound, not for spiritual reasons, but logistics. It’s a small space, many people, and past visitors carrying on about people in the way of their “shot” created the no photos rule.
So, worth visiting, just disappointing it is so poorly organised, and rushed.
