![]() ![]() None of this is to be taken to mean that bronze fell out of use. On the other hand, it required much hotter fires to extract it from its ore and so it took a fair degree of skill to use iron. Iron was a far superior metal to bronze, being stronger and more durable. Iron had been introduced to the Celtic peoples in Europe around 1000 to 700BC, thus giving them the technological edge to spread as they did. ![]() ![]() The Celts had one major advantage – they had discovered Iron. Within a few hundred years, Ireland’s Bronze Age culture had all but disappeared, and Celtic culture was in place across the entire island. Developing in the Alps of central Europe, the Celts spread their culture across modern-day Germany and France and into the Balkans as far as Turkey. The recognition that it provides an accurate means of measuring the solar year (to within a margin of several minutes), is testimony to the prehistoric mind.Īs the Bronze Age in Ireland drew to a close, there appeared in Ireland a new cultural influence. Surrounded by a stone circle (12 remaining from an estimated original 36), with 97 Kerb-stones, an internal cruciform chamber and corbelled roof, the grandiose scale of the earth-works at Newgrange make it one of the most spectacular of prehistoric monuments in all Europe. This makes it more than 600 years older than the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, and 1,000 years more ancient than Stonehenge. It was constructed around 3200BC, according to the most reliable Carbon 14 dates available from archaeology. Above picture shows Newgrange, which is one of the best examples in Ireland and in Western Europe, of a type of monument known to archaeologists as a passage-grave or passage-tomb. ![]()
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