A Different Sense of Time

When local lore keeps a 4,000-year-old tomb hidden in plain sight, the key to finding it is a special way of seeing

From the Spring 2024 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Timothy Deenihan

Billy Mag Fhloinn sees time different than most. For a start, he sees time.

Walking the hills near his home in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland, Mag Fhloinn takes in the view. “You see a bee and a daffodil,” he says. “And these lifespans are just a few weeks. But then there’s us: fourscore years, maybe five if we’re lucky. Then they’re the hills we both are on, which have been there for millennia.

“The more he speaks, the more this temporal synesthesia becomes infectious. You start to see time as a concert, and the rolling hills, the grass waving under the heavy breeze and the clouds—all of it is just sheet music wherein every life, every person, all the births and deaths and the farms and the flowers are all happening at once, just on different lines and at different tempos.

It’s the sort of perspective that enriches sim-ply, yet deeply, even the quietest amble through the countryside.

It can also provide the key to finding a “lost” 4,000-year-old neolithic tomb.

Mag Fhloinn (the surname is pronounced the same as its anglicized cousin, “McGlynn”), a folklorist teaching in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at SHU in Dingle, has long had a fascination with the ancient tombs scattered about his homeland. “The dead don’t bury themselves,” he says, noting that each tomb’s shape and structure, contents, positioning and placement all say as much, if not more, about the values and customs of the cultures that built it as about its residents.

This passion for exploring lives once lived started when he was but a young lad in County Limerick, Ireland. At around 17 or 18, as part of his studies, he visited the Loughcrew passage tombs in County Meath, a series of megalithic tombs estimated to be roughly 5,200 years old. There are 32 cairns spread over the area, the highest and most famous of which is Cairn T, built so that it aligns perfectly with the sun’s first light on the mornings following equinox. Twice a year, ancient drawings of bursting sunlight on the back wall of the cairn come to life, uniquely illuminated on those specific days by the first light of the rising sun. Young Mag Fhloinn was there for sunrise to witness the semiannual spectacle that seems to make the past actively present, time once again harmonizing with itself.

“It’s like the cairn somehow captures some-thing of the sun,” he says, as if, in those mystical moments every year, the sunlight reveals itself to be more than just light; as if the sun itself be-comes a medium—a telephone line, if you will, however patchy the connection may be—allowing the past to reach out directly to the present, helping to tell the story of those who lived and loved, farmed and fought, and sought to under-stand the world around them so many years ago.

Filtering the noise of that patchy connection has become Mag Fhloinn’s life’s work. Explaining what it means to be a folklorist, he points to other disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses for comparison. “If you want to know what happened, you read history,” he says. “But if you want to know how the people felt about it, read the poetry.

“History and archaeology can take us back, give us an idea of what people were where and what they did, but it’s folklore that gives it all context,” he continues. “It can be a tremendous prism to look at the past.” That is, to understand the folk, explore their lore.

That knowledge of tradition—lived and told and written down through the years—is what led Mag Fhloinn to make his own discovery late last year.

The Altóir na Gréine (or the Sun Altar) is a 4,000-year-old wedge tomb that was thought to have been lost to antiquity. It was last sketched by Lady Georgiana Chatterton during her travels in 1838. But only 14 years later, in 1852, antiquarian Richard Hitchcock reported that site had been broken up and repurposed,most likely for building.

Hitchcock’s report never sat well with Mag Fhloinn. While it was possible the altar had been broken up and carried off, “I just suspected that it wasn’t a complete destruction because there were still rumblings about it in oral tradition,” he says. His belief was that something of the tomb survived, out there on a hillside somewhere. But where?

Comparing photographs of the hills near his home in Dingle to the 1838 sketch by Lady Chatterton, Mag Fhloinn had a few locations that were worthy of a closer look. Through early fall of last year, he visited them all, but kept returning to one spot in particular. It didn’t look exactly the same as the sketch—the capstone had fallen and some pieces had indeed been lost, either to the weather or industrious locals—but one unnaturally upright stone had him confident he’d found the lost tomb. He created a 3D model of the site to compare to the Chatterton sketch and, finally confident it was time to “lay my cards on the table,” as he says, Mag Fhloinn contacted the National Monuments Service in Dublin. A site visit was conducted in December, at which time the authenticity of the discovery was immediately confirmed.

Excavation of the site is highly unlikely, Mag Fhloinn says. The process is costly, even in the best of circumstances. The tomb’s remoteness would only add to the costs, and while acidic soils around the tomb might be good for preserving some forms of organic matter, they are disastrous for bone, making the likelihood of any significant additional finds at the site quite low.

That’s not to say there isn’t more work to be done. As is often the way with such things, the answer of the tomb’s location only raises more questions. For one, though most wedge tombs have a westerly or southwesterly aspect (presumed to be aligned with the setting sun) Altóir na Gréine seems built on a northwest/southeast line. As the cultures who built such tombs were most often deeply influenced by cosmology, the unique direction of the tomb would make it an oddity.

And, as with all art and science, it’s the oddities that tell the story. These tombs were not individual graves. Wedge tombs such as the one Mag Fhloinn found, and of which there are more than 500 documented in Ireland, had a high, wide front which then lowered and narrowed to the back. They were communal, both in the construction (“scores of people literally pulling the heavy stones up the hills and into place,” Mag Fhloinn says) and in use. Yes, they were burial sites. But all signs indicate that the dead had a role among the living for the cultures who built them, so the tombs appear not only to have been places for the deceased to be put to rest, but also perhaps to be venerated, consulted or even politicized as these communities invoked the legacies and memories of those who went before to validate their own issues and concerns. Thus, rather like in biology where a species’ mutation tells the story of its origin, the uncommon northwest/southeast direction of Altóir na Gréine may someday tell Mag Fhloinn and his colleagues what made the people of this ancient coastal community unique.

In the meantime, Billy Mag Fhloinn will continue to walk the hills of Dingle, appreciating as he does the bees and the rocks and the sun—and the stories that help humans understand their place in it all.