Ben Lowry: The days are getting longer! The days are getting longer!

In the picture to accompany this article, a crowd is celebrating today’s winter solstice dawn.
By Ben Lowry
Published 22nd Dec 2023, 21:30 GMT
Updated 23rd Dec 2023, 05:30 GMT
People take part in the winter solstice celebrations at the Stonehenge prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire today, the shortest day, Friday December 22, 2023. Ben Lowry wishes he could join them. But not when they return in June ... Photo: Ben Birchall/PA WirePeople take part in the winter solstice celebrations at the Stonehenge prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire today, the shortest day, Friday December 22, 2023. Ben Lowry wishes he could join them. But not when they return in June ... Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Wire
People take part in the winter solstice celebrations at the Stonehenge prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire today, the shortest day, Friday December 22, 2023. Ben Lowry wishes he could join them. But not when they return in June ... Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Wire

(Click here to read Ben Lowry’s main column on legacy)

​I wish I had been with them.

The shortest day is always a cause for celebration, I would say.

However, the same celebrants, many of whom are Druids, modern day followers of the ancient pagan Celtic movement, also celebrate the longest day of the year, the summer solstice at the famous prehistoric monument in Wiltshire. I would give that June date a miss.

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While it is a joy to reach this point in the calendar when daylight returns, I always feel a tinge of gloom when they begin to pull in again. Summer is just ahead you might think on June 21/22? So what if the days are shrinking…

The winter solstice is so important that I almost wish I had been around to dance with the crowds at the winter solstice in Newgrange in what is now Co Meath, 5,000 years ago. What civilised people they were, both being able to pinpoint the shortest day, and to make a chamber which was so precisely engineered that the sun comes right in at dawn but only on the very shortest days of the year​​​​​​.

As I wrote recently, sunsets in Northern Ireland have been getting later now slightly for a week, pre solstice (click here), and sunrises will keep getting later until the end of the month, post. But in terms of overall daylight, today was the shortest.

Things improve from here.

Merry Christmas …

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

Related topics:Ben LowryCelticNorthern Ireland