HILTON PARK, Ireland, Aug. 9, 2013 – Sitting in a remarkable manor home that has been in the same family for almost three hundred years, a day after standing breathless in the pitch darkness of a five-thousand-year-old passage tomb, and coming inside from helping a five-year-old boy catch his first pike, I marvel at how Ireland compresses time and the long reach of history.

Everywhere we have gone we have seen things that are startling, and unbelievably old. The passage tombs of Newgrange and Knowth, buried deep beneath mounds with hundreds of tons of earth and stone that ancient peoples somehow dragged dozens miles, are more than five hundred years older than the great Egyptian pyramids, and were built one thousand years before Stonehenge. We all were moved by the complexity and mystery of the passage tombs, which give lie to the idea that the people of prehistoric times were simple, ignorant people. The passage tombs are amazing feats of architecture, engineering and astronomy—made as much with brilliance as with brute strength—somehow oriented precisely with the rising sun on the winter solstice in case of Newgrange and fall and spring equinoxes at other tombs.

At Newgrange, the sun rising on the shortest day of the year enters a narrow box between giant boulders, shoots through a slim, 20-meter column deep into the center of a mound, shimmers as it moves slowly across the stone floor until it reaches the back of the passage and illuminates a series of suns and other symbols carved into stone. No one knows how or why these passage tombs were built all over western Europe, but it seems they were meant at least partially to celebrate the passing of the seasons—of time, again. The light flashing into Newgrange meant that another year had passed, that the days would again grow longer, not shorter, and that the darkness would slowly, steadily, begin to lift again. The ashes of the dead were also discovered inside these tombs, suggesting that perhaps these mounds were places where the spirits of the dead were carefully placed so they would be lifted, in the shimmering sunlight, into the next world.

Newgrange and Knowth, the two passage tombs we explored at the ancient site more broadly known as Bru Na Boinne, were among the most moving historic sites we have ever visited. Another nearby hill dotted with passage tombs, Loughcrew, was similarly powerful. We made the long, slow climb up the hillside to Loughcrew where an Irish guide led our family alone inside a passage tomb, and she shined her flashlight on a descending row of sun symbols, precisely oriented to catch the moving sun once, and only once, each year.

At a moment when my life, and those lives of the people I love, seems to be hurtling past, it is reassuring to experience Irish time, where history just seems to go backwards forever and forever, and around the next corner, or the next stop, I will see something that is unfathomably old. One moment I am drinking ale in the second oldest pub in Ireland, with its two-foot-thick stone walls, the next I am sitting in the drawing room of an estate house that was built more than a century before Oregon, my home, was even settled by pioneers.

On the way to Loughcrew we pulled in to visit the ruins of the church and gardens where St. Oliver Plunkett was believed to be born and first raised. St. Oliver was falsely accused of treason and drawn and quartered by the English, and the roofless church ruins had a tragic feeling. It was an exceptionally dark and evocative place, with English ivy climbing the shattered stone walls and weathered headstones leaning this way and that in knee-high grass. Will discovered what looked like an open tomb in the thick grass. The place seemed so very Irish, a country that is, by turns, beautiful and sad, stunning and spiritual.

But then there was that little boy, representing the tenth generation of the Maddens, the family that built Hilton Park in 1734, taking the rod after showing me where to cast, the silver lure arcing through the gray Irish sky, and setting the hook on the hungry pike, reeling wildly, shouting with excitement, then dropping the rod on the little dock and running to tell his parents about his catch. I was left holding the rod while the pike lazed on the surface, worried that this boy’s first fish was going to get away before he returned, and counting the minutes, which seemed to go by so very slowly, in the way they do in Ireland.