Words by Karen O’Leary.

Samhain – the Celtic holiday that has since become known as Hallowe’en – marked the crossing of more than one threshold. On this night, the boundary between the otherworld and our world was thought to be at its thinnest, which is where all those traditions designed to either welcome or ward off the supernatural come from.

As well as celebrating this liminal space, Samhain also honoured a junction of time - the end of the year, or rather, one half of it. Just like the split between night and day, the Celts saw the entire year as such: a darker half a lighter one, Samhain a gateway between the two.

The Celts had a different approach to timekeeping. Curiously, their day didn’t begin at midnight, but at sunset. Opening with the disappearance of light, each day embraced the entire passage into darkness, and out of it. It makes you wonder why it is that our days begin at the somewhat hazy hour of midnight, that perhaps the boundaries of time are somehow both fixed and a little arbitrary, both real and made-up, like directions on a compass. Sunset may have been a clearer, albeit ever-changing, marker of the border between night and day. With winter just around the corner, Samhain acted as a kind of sunset on summer as a whole, heralding in the full depths of darkness yet to come.

In places where sunlight is sparse, its rarity makes it all the more precious. Newgrange, Ireland’s most famous Neolithic passage tomb (constructed before the Celts ever arrived – and long before both Stone Henge and the Pyramids, mind you) was not designed to let much light in. If anything, it’s designed to keep the light out. Somehow – who knows how – they specifically engineered the tomb’s window to catch a narrow beam of dawn at an angle only possible on the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year. This being Ireland, most of the time it’s too cloudy for the light to break through. But when it does, there is a brief moment of almost inexplicable magic, before the mornings slowly start to brighten up all over again.