I have my moments of despair, the doomster feeling that we’ve cooked ourselves a new dark ages. Yet this year’s winter solstice brought a sudden uplifting surprise with some help from our neolithic forebears.
A subtle sunrise for the solstice. Just a pink stain dawning on the eastern horizon – over there between the Scots pine and the Noble fir around 8.25 this morning.
I’m not an early bird but, waiting for a delivery to arrive, I woke at 6am when it was pitch black. Not a creature was stirring. Or not one that I could see.
Now here I am among busy black birds and red squirrels watching for the gleam that hundreds of miles away might soon be lighting up the Neolithic burial chambers of Newgrange in Ireland – and in a few more hours at Maeshowe in Orkney – as it has been doing for five thousand years.
I tried several times to catch that late afternoon moment at Maeshowe through a webcam but the technology stopped working a few years ago and now only photographs show the miraculous beam of light blazing a golden path towards the ancient chamber at sunset on the shortest day of the year.
At this season the sun is a pale wick between two gulfs of darkness:
George Mackay Brown
A time for gathering
But here on the screen is Newgrange in a Youtube broadcast arranged by The Office of Public Works (OPW) and National Monuments Services (NMS) with Irish Times commentators all ready for sunrise around 8.40am. By the time I tune in just before 9am there’s a thousand people outside the cairn, holding hands and forming a circle. A new tradition for the winter solstice has grown up with the gathering crowds in the last few years. “It’s a time for gathering, I always think, a time for holding hands,” says the Irish Times commentator quietly. The solstice is not an occasion for loud voices.
Perhaps there’s something quietly comforting in the thought that people were gathering for a December dawn five thousand years ago in a ceremonial building. Quite apart from the extraordinary ancient skills involved – the astronomy, the architecture, the sheer physical expertise it took to build the cairns. No machinery, just tools made by hand of wood, bone, stone wielded with human determination. Brawn, brain, and collaborative effort (or to quote my new Ecosia AI pal: “Teams of people coordinated pulling with ropes, sometimes aided by animals.”)
Quite apart from all that (and a good deal more in the genius of the stonemasonry built to withstand the battering storms of the ages) it certainly beats the morning headlines I wake up to most days. I try not to wonder whether there will be any kind of celebratory hominid happening at around the solstice in 7025.
The turning point
Outside, the sky is beginning to light up. It’s 8.45 am. You don’t have to be an early bird to catch the sunrise in Scotland at this time of year. But, clutching a mug of hot tea, I’m surprised by my own involuntary excitement as the clouds turn red and gold against bands of blue sky. The sun is shining. After dreary days of relentless rain that alone would be worth getting out of bed for but there’s an extra pleasure in the knowledge that this marks a turning point in the year. Days will soon begin to stretch.
Maybe it’s my imagination but the birds seem to sense it too. The primeval emotional fluttering at the solstice is not just for humans. There’s quite a flurry of wings round the feeders – gold and greenfinches, chaffinches, blue tits, coal tits, nuthatches, magpies, blackbirds, robins – all our usual crowd in fact, lining up on the sun-tinted branches. On the pond swans and cygnets are swooping up and down stretching their wings in sudden splashy display. I find myself making an old year resolution.
I have my moments of despair, the doomster feeling that we’ve cooked ourselves a new dark ages. Our 21st century legacy of disruptive climate change will last for thousands of years (a somewhat less impressive bequest than the Neolithic monuments) so the certainty of sunrise and sunset is perhaps the one thing we can depend on. Christmas is my present distraction, but in the New Year I shall renew that resolution. Salute the sun. Seize the day.
Wishing you all (family, friends, old and new readers) the best of days in the coming new year.
[Sharing a new year greeting from my blog fayyoung.org]
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