The Stone I Carried into Newgrange

Why a Five-Thousand-Year-Old Tomb Appears in Every Book of the Cosmic Janitor Trilogy

12 April 2026 ~ 3 min read

Almost ten years ago, I visited Newgrange for the first time. At the visitor center, there was a craft fair going on, and I met a man who was making stone necklaces—small pieces of slate with the triskele spiral carved on one side. On the other, he would carve your name in Ogham. I had him carve Liam on the back of mine, and when I asked him about it, he told me I should wear it into Newgrange to “activate” it.

I laughed. Then I walked into the passage tomb wearing the necklace, and I stopped laughing.

Newgrange is older than the pyramids by about five hundred years. It was built around 3200 BCE by people whose names we will never know, and it was designed so that on the morning of the winter solstice, a narrow beam of sunlight travels down the nineteen-meter passage and illuminates the inner chamber for exactly seventeen minutes. The rest of the year, the chamber is dark. Five thousand years of engineering, and it still works. Standing inside that passage, wearing a stone with my name carved in the same alphabet the ancient Irish used, I felt something I can’t fully explain and won’t try to rationalize. The man at the craft fair might have been selling souvenirs. He might have been telling the truth.

That experience became the seed for Newgrange’s role in the Trilogy. In all three books, characters return to the site the way I return to it—not as tourists, but as people drawn to a place that holds something older than language. In Book 2, the Book of Ravens is hidden beneath the great entrance stone—the one covered in those triple spirals, the same triskele pattern carved on the necklace I wore through the passage. I didn’t plan that connection when I bought the necklace. But when I needed a hiding place for the most important object in the novel, there was only one place it could be.

The spirals matter. The triskele—three interlocking spirals—appears throughout Celtic art and throughout the Trilogy. Three books. Three movements. Three ways of listening. The shape keeps repeating because the ancient Irish understood something about patterns that complete themselves by circling back. Newgrange is built on that understanding. So is the Trilogy, whether I intended it or not. It even makes a guest appearance in Three Moons.

Every December, I watch the winter solstice broadcast from Newgrange on their YouTube channel. They stream the sunrise live, and if the weather cooperates, you can see the light travel down the passage in real time—the same beam, the same angle, the same seventeen minutes as five thousand years ago. It’s the most ancient appointment in Ireland, and it happens whether anyone is watching or not.

They also hold a lottery every year. A handful of people are selected at random to stand inside the chamber on solstice morning and watch the light arrive in person. I enter every year. I’m pretty sure this is my year.

~ Liam