Every December, a few hundred people stand in a chamber at Newgrange and watch the sun find the roof-box. Tens of thousands enter the lottery for those places. Almost none of them get in.

This year, don't wait for a lottery result. Come and spend solstice morning in the Boyne Valley with someone who has been watching that light arrive for twenty-seven years.

Three ways to be there

Three ways to be there. The live morning on its own, the morning with the aerial film and a signed print, or the limited solstice print by itself.

What the morning is

We start in the dark, above the bend of the river, with drone footage of Bru na Boinne that nobody else has — Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth and the whole sacred landscape seen from the air, across eight years of mornings. You'll hear where you're standing and what you're looking at before the sun comes anywhere near it.

Then we go monument by monument. Why this bend of the river? Why the roof-box points where it points. What Knowth's stones say that Newgrange's don't. What the builders knew about the sky five thousand years before anyone wrote it down.

Around 8:40 I'll point you to the live broadcast from inside the chamber, where the OPW has streamed the sunrise each year since 2020. Free, and worth watching. I'll be here when you come back, and we'll take apart what you just saw — the beam, the alignment, the years it worked and the many years the Irish weather refused. There's archive photography from all of it.

The last hour is yours. Questions taken live, by name, for as long as people want to ask them.

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 What the morning isn't 

It isn't a livestream from inside the chamber — that's the OPW's, and it's free, and I'll be pointing you towards it. Nor is it a promise that the sun will break through. Some solstice mornings at Newgrange are extraordinary, and some are grey from dawn to dusk. We'll be together for whatever this one gives us, and the morning is built so that the light is never the only thing worth being there for.

What it is: three hours in the valley with someone who has spent a lifetime in it. The aerial archive. The astronomy. Twenty-seven years of photographs. And you, asking anything you like.

 Wherever you are

The event runs on Irish time, and most of the world will be asleep for the beginning of it. That's why every ticket includes the full recording — watch it live if you can, or wake to it at a civilised hour and take the whole morning with your coffee.

Who's taking you through it?

Anthony Murphy has been photographing and writing about the monuments of the Boyne Valley for twenty-seven years. He is the author of eleven books on ancient Ireland, the discoverer of Dronehenge — a Late Neolithic henge near Newgrange — and has found more than 230 previously unrecorded monuments through aerial survey. He lives in the Boyne Valley.

A morning in the valley, on the shortest day of the year 

Monday 21 December 2026

7:15am to 10:30am Irish time. 

Live online, recording included. 

Places are open now.

Book your place