Well, if you didn't fall asleep by reading the articles, then maybe you noticed a restrained sense of humour peeking through. You didn't!! Oh well, I suppose being too serious has taken its toll on me and I have to profess that here is where I get to inflict grevious bodily humour on you.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out which of the ancient relics in the picture above is over 4,500 years old. If you said the item on the left, you'd be right, congratulations, collect your prize at the door, ahem! Oh, didn't I tell you, I haven't decided what that will be, but as soon as I think of something, you'll be the first to know. If you said the relic in the yellow and green anorak, Hurrah, you're almost right, because I feel that old having traipsed across most of Ireland's hills and mountains in search of weirdly carved rocks and oddly shaped stones.

Hello there , only an Irishman would try that line of talk and get away with it. And only a Dubliner would try to tell you about it, in no uncertain terms. The picture above is of the famous Polnabrone Megalithic dolmen, in County Clare, and the not so famous individual is me, Paul Griffin. I was just fixing the capstone there, it seemed to be slipping into my pocket, ahem! I come from a long line of artists. Nearly all the family are into it, well some of them, but when it came to giving out the artistic genes, so to speak, guess who got shortchanged. Well at least I didn't end up with one ear, Pardon? What's that you said, Sonny? I'm some class of a photographer and another class of budding short story writer. I have inflicted you with two short humourous ones here on these pages. and not forgetting a Megalithic hunter and 'gatherer' and a new class of archaeoastronomer.. So here is where I let my hair down, no wait not such a good idea that,.. here's where I let it all hang out, naw, its been hanging out all over the place for years now, and unsightly I'd say , judging by the looks I get. I know, yeah, here's where I get trendy, yeah be trendy, they'll understand, they'll sympathise.

So I have a few stories to tell you, of an archaeological nature and a not so archaeological er..nature.

So ,There I was parked at the Tara, historical..oops sorry, Heritage site, in cloudy Co.Meath, on one of my numerous impromptu megalithic pilgrimages that I occasionally go mad on. Tara is the sort of place that you end up in when the crowds get too much at Newgrange and you can't stand walking another blasted foot over trendy little bridges. Or if you still have a thirst for things Mega, you get tired of watching the same piece of Knowth open to the GP for the last 38 years. Someone had better hurry up there and finish the excavations otherwise, I'll be too old and decrepid and they'll have to push my wheelchair up the Eastern passage ramp. Anyway, it would probably get stuck halfway into the dark end and then they'd have to call the RSPCA or some other such emergency team to separate me from Knowth interior. I swear somebody broke the only trowel at the site back in 1967, then it was teaspoons all round for everyone. (onlyslagging). Where was I, oh yeah. It's way too early in the morning for this, 10:30 am, and there's one camper like van parked there, with a 'D' sticker on the back of it. It's absolutely freezing outside, but the van is a hive of activity, all motion is spandex and Guten tag, frittering about the van, trying on clothes, no that doesn't fit, try on another jumper , no still too big. Trust the Germans to be the first ones up in the morning before everybody else has decided to crash out from the local boozer. I ease myself out of my car and shuffle awkwardly ( well you would if you drove on these back roads) into the gift shop. God its full of foreigns, wall to wall foreigners, picking this and that up, turning trinkets around in their oh so tanned hands, conversing in every language under the Sun, except English. I wait until they're all gone before I launch into a question that has been on my mind for quite some time.

Carefully looking around making sure nobody but me and the proprietress are there I haltingly ask, "Can you tell me where the underground catacombs are?" She looks at me the way a barman would stare at a customer asking for a glass of water, all perplexed and silent. "Eh," she begins, "What kind of caves would they be then?" "Oh," said I," the ones at Tara here, I know they're here, underground caves". "Don't know of any such thing, would you like to buy a guide maybe?" Disappointed at the lack of info, I cave in and shell out £2 ( rapid inflation had set in that morning) for a Boyne Valley booklet, slim version, make that very slim, and exit to the car, slightly embarassed by the whole episode.

Then I find myself mopping around Dowth near Newgrange. To the unaided eye, this monument is a big pile of stones and trees interspersed with even bigger rocks around the edges, to the megalithic hunter, its still a big pile of stones and trees and what not. Suddenly I remember all those years ago. I have stumbled on the long lost catacomb entrance after all. It has a steel ladder going down into the ground and padlocked off at the top by an iron-like grill. So sorry Missus at Tara, the mind plays tricks, you know. Memories of my first encounter with megaliths came flooding back.

We were let out from prison..er school for a day trip, and we went banannas at our luck. The prison warden er.. teacher told us to pass on the news amongst the others that a bus would pick us up and we'd be going to Slane a small village, 30 miles North of Dublin (did anybody warn them we were heading in their direction? not on yer life). Some eejit decided to have a bit of fun and passed along the message that we were all going to be slain. This upset some of the prisoners er..I mean schoolboys in our group and we had a hard time convincing them otherwise. So a nervous bus driver picked up 40 chattering schoolboys and a teacher and set off to be slain,er... I mean to Slane. The bus stopped at the village, it didn't break down, but we think the driver did, faced with 40 yahoo jacks let loose for the day in the wild country. We saw him at the footpath nervously chainsmoking Aftons and swearing about going into the taxi business.

Finally we had arrived at Dowth and all trooped up to the entrance I just described. Somebody whispered "Its solitary confinement, they want to put us in solitary". Needless to say there was more convincing to be done. One by one we scaled down the iron ladder into the pitch dark. At the bottom the warden eh..teacher was there and lit a solitary candle and gave one to each boy with instructions to move down the passageway and follow the rest. The lone candle flickered and shimmered in the jet black dark. They gave us one of those wax like holders, you know, the sort of thing you get trifle in, but soon the wax would slowly crawl down the sides of yer candle and creep over onto the fingers, so you had to manipulate the thing like you would a melting ice cream cone, twisting it this way and that and praying it didn't go out, or you were a goner. As if that wasn't enough to contend with, some young gurriers decided to try and blow out the candles of some other young gurriers and there was audible threats of doing unspeakable things to each other when we all got out of the dark,.. if we got out that is. Some of us got temporarily stuck in a narrow section of the passage, some faked it, some didn't, ourblazers took a beating that day.

As we filed down the spooky passage we'd occasionally passed by individual cells that contained human bones and assorted skulls behind locked off bars. The most educational comments we could muster for the teacher amounted to " Jasus would ya just look at the state of yer man" , or "he's got no body". That was the extent of it. We all trooped back to the bus, I don't think we went on to Newgrange, they were probably warned ahead of time and barracaded the road with burning cars.