Archaeology 360: Hill of Tara, Co. Meath


Stand on top of Tara and you're standing on the spot Irish tradition insists was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland - though don't come expecting a castle; what you're walking over is a scatter of grassy earthworks that ask a bit of imagination of you. Start where this video does, at the Banqueting Hall (Teach Miodhchuarta), not really a hall at all but a long, parallel-banked avenue at the northern end of the hill, thought to be one of the last things ever built here. Head down past the Sloping Trenches (Claonfhearta) and Rath Chaelchon, a huddle of Bronze Age burial mounds ringed with ditches on the hill's northwestern slope, then on past the Rath of the Synods - once a multi-ringed enclosure that turned up Roman trinkets when excavated, and which was badly torn up in the early 1900s by treasure hunters convinced the Ark of the Covenant was buried underneath. The big grassy ring at the centre of it all is Rath Righ, the Enclosure of the Kings, roughly a kilometre round and dug about 100 BC, and inside it sit two more earthworks fused together in a figure of eight: Teach Cormaic (Cormac's House) and An Forradh, the Royal Seat. On top of the Forradh stands the stone everyone's really here to see - the Lia Fáil, or Stone of Destiny, one of the treasures the mythical Tuatha Dé Danann are said to have brought to Ireland, and reputed to roar aloud when the rightful king laid hands on it (it was moved here, so the story goes, in 1798 to mark the United Irishmen killed on the hill that year, so its current spot isn't its original one). Older than any of that is the Mound of the Hostages, a passage tomb pushing 5,000 years old, its narrow entrance aligned so the passage catches the rising sun around Samhain and Imbolc, and where excavators found hundreds of cremated burials plus two gold torcs - neck ornaments, essentially - left in among them. Finish, as the tour does, at the standing stones in the churchyard by St Patrick's Church, itself built in the 1820s on the site of a much older one - a fittingly quiet end to a walk across three thousand years of kings, myth, and the odd bit of grave robbing.
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References

Wikipedia contributors, 'Hill of Tara', Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia


'Hill of Tara', Heritage Ireland

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