Saturday, June 2. By this point, we'd had enough big-city experience for a while, and were ready to see some of the Irish countryside. We took a bus out to the airport, rented a car, and drove up to Brú na Bóinne, a 5000-year-old necropolis and our third World Heritage site.

There are two publicly accessible sites at Brú na Bóinne: Knowth and Newgrange. They're both passage tombs built about 5000 years ago by neolithic peoples to hold their cremains. They look like large hills with tunnels cut into them. The kerbstones around the edges and the tombs inside are decorated with intricate engravings. We also got an excellent view of the surrounding Boyne river valley (site of the Battle of the Boyne).