The Turning of the Year — Live Ticket

Spend solstice morning in the Boyne Valley, live, with Anthony Murphy.

Every December a few hundred people stand inside the chamber at Newgrange and watch the sun find the roof-box. Tens of thousands enter the lottery for those places. This is the other way in.

Three hours, from 7:15am to 10:30am Irish time on Monday 21 December 2026. We begin in the dark above the bend of the Boyne with eight years of drone footage across Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth and the whole Bru na Boinne landscape. Then monument by monument: the alignment, the architecture, the archaeology, and what the builders knew about the sky five thousand years before anyone wrote it down.

Around 8:40 you'll be pointed to the live broadcast from inside the chamber, which the OPW has streamed each year since 2020. Come back afterwards and we'll take apart what you just saw — the beam, the seventeen minutes of light, the years it worked and the years the Irish weather refused. Twenty-seven years of photographs from the archive.

The final hour is questions, taken live and by name.

Please note: this is not a broadcast from inside the chamber. That broadcast is free and you will be directed to it. This is the morning around it — the landscape, the astronomy, the archive, and your questions answered.

Full recording included, sent to you on Tuesday 22 December, so you can watch live or at a civilised hour in your own timezone.