The most famous of such fairy hills are about five miles from Drogheda.[165] They are still connected with the names of the Tuatha Dé Danann, though they are now not called their dwelling-places, but their tombs. On the northern bank of the Boyne stand seventeen barrows, three of which—Knowth, Dowth, and New Grange—are of great size. The last named, largest, and best preserved, is over 300 feet in diameter, and 70 feet high, while its top makes a platform 120 feet across. It has been explored, and Roman coins, gold torques, copper pins, and iron rings and knives have been found in it; but what else it may have once contained will never be known, for, like Knowth and Dowth, it was thoroughly ransacked by Danish spoilers in the ninth century. It is entered by a square doorway, the rims of which are elaborately ornamented with a kind of spiral pattern. This entrance leads to a stone passage, more than 60 feet long, which gradually widens and rises, until it opens into a chamber with a conical dome 20 feet high. On each side of this central chamber is a recess, with a shallow oval stone basin in it. The huge slabs of which the whole is built are decorated upon both the outer and the inner faces with the same spiral pattern as the doorway. The origin of these astonishing prehistoric monuments is unknown, but they are generally attributed to the race that inhabited Ireland before the Celts. Gazing at marvellous New Grange, one might very well echo the words of the old Irish poet Mac Nia, in the Book of Ballymote: “Behold the _Sídh_ before your eyes, It is manifest to you that it is a king’s mansion, Which was built by the firm Dagda, It was a wonder, a court, an admirable hill.”[166] It is not, however, with New Grange, or even with Knowth or Dowth, that the Dagda’s name is now associated. It is a smaller barrow, nearer to the Boyne, which is known as the “Tomb of the Dagda”. It has never been opened, and Dr. James Fergusson, the author of _Rude Stone Monuments_, who holds the Tuatha Dé Danann to have been a real people, thinks that “the bones and armour of the great Dagda may still be found in his honoured grave”.[167] Other Celtic scholars might not be so sanguine, though verses as old as the eleventh century assert that the Tuatha Dé Danann used the brughs for burial. It was about this period that the mythology of Ireland was being rewoven into spurious history. The poem, which is called the “Chronicles of the Tombs”, not only mentions the “Monument of the Dagda” and the “Monument of the Morrígú”, but also records the last resting-places of Ogma, Etain, Cairpré, Lugh, Boann, and Angus.