New Grange has long reigned as Ireland's cyclopean answer to Stonehenge, but the tourist franchise of the vast megalithic pile now seems in doubt.
A drone camera flown during this year's withering Irish drought has revealed an even larger ring structure five minutes walk away. Even Tallbloke, a Watts & Curry fellow traveler who knows a thing or two about ignoring scientific evidence in persuit of climate denial is impressed to the point of reblogging the discovery, but has he considered its ramifications?
The question that arises from this megalithic marvel lying fallow for millenia is: when will it dawn on the denialati that they have a new palaeoclimatic publicity problem. By by slumbering in obscurity for five thousand years, this monument threatens to demote the largely anecdotal & local interludes climate obscurantists carp on -- Minoan, Roman, and Medieval, to Less Warm Than Now Periods too cool to reveal what lies below the surface of the past.
Now, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, one of the worst droughts since the Bronze Age has made things long invisible plain as day.
"What the f*** is that?"
A drone camera flown during this year's withering Irish drought has revealed an even larger ring structure five minutes walk away. Even Tallbloke, a Watts & Curry fellow traveler who knows a thing or two about ignoring scientific evidence in persuit of climate denial is impressed to the point of reblogging the discovery, but has he considered its ramifications?
The question that arises from this megalithic marvel lying fallow for millenia is: when will it dawn on the denialati that they have a new palaeoclimatic publicity problem. By by slumbering in obscurity for five thousand years, this monument threatens to demote the largely anecdotal & local interludes climate obscurantists carp on -- Minoan, Roman, and Medieval, to Less Warm Than Now Periods too cool to reveal what lies below the surface of the past.
Now, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, one of the worst droughts since the Bronze Age has made things long invisible plain as day.
An Ancient Mystery Henge Has Appeared in
'Once in a Lifetime' Discovery in Ireland
"What the f*** is that?"
PETER DOCKRILL 17 JUL 2018
It materialised out of almost nowhere. Thousands of years after disappearing from human sight and knowledge, an ancient 'henge' site has been discovered hidden within the archaeological landscape of Ireland's Brú na Bóinne.
To reveal this long-forgotten structure, it took a chance intersection between an aerial drone flight and a brutal hot streak that's been slowly roasting the UK for weeks.
The same environmental conditions have unveiled dozens of concealed architectural apparitions in recent weeks, but when eyes were laid on this prehistoric, epic circle invisibly cradled within the Boyne Valley, the sacred truly met the profane.
"What the f*** is that?" photographer and author Anthony Murphy yelled to another photographer friend nearby.
"I've been telling all the media here that I shouted, 'What the hell is that,' but it was actually a stronger expletive," he explained to NPR.
"When we saw this, we knew straight away, this had never been seen or recorded before."Co-discoverer and fellow drone photographer Ken Williams at first couldn't believe the pictures the drones were relaying, assuming the traced outline of buried prehistoric mounds was a strange artefact of drone interference, or perhaps crop circles stamped by pranksters.
"What we were looking at seemed too good to be true," he wrote on his blog.
"We moved in closer to look at it in detail, [and] we could see for certain that this was the colouration of standing crops that had not been interfered with. What we were looking at was beneath, within the soil, not in the crops themselves."
The circular pattern is approximately 150 metres (492 ft) in diameter, with an interior space stretching up to 120 metres (393 ft) in diameter.
"What we were looking at seemed too good to be true," he wrote on his blog.
"We moved in closer to look at it in detail, [and] we could see for certain that this was the colouration of standing crops that had not been interfered with. What we were looking at was beneath, within the soil, not in the crops themselves."
The circular pattern is approximately 150 metres (492 ft) in diameter, with an interior space stretching up to 120 metres (393 ft) in diameter.
