This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

In a few weeks’ time, just 38 lottery winners — chosen from 16,000 global applicants — will stand in the darkness of Newgrange’s 5,200-year-old chamber in Ireland’s Boyne Valley in anticipation of an astronomical magic trick. For 17 minutes during a narrow five-day window around the winter solstice in December, a precise beam of light will connect them to the astronomical mastery of the monument’s Neolithic builders.

Each year, as the solstice sun rises over County Meath, a narrow beam of light pierces through a small stone opening above the tomb’s entrance — a ‘roof-box’ designed to capture the first rays of the midwinter sun — and travels 19 metres along the passage, illuminating the chamber’s intricate megalithic art and

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