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Archaeology 360: Clonca Church & High Cross, Co. Donegal

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Swing round this shot and you're in the graveyard at Clonca, on the Inishowen peninsula near Culdaff - a monastic site with roots back to the 6th century. According to tradition, founded by St Baudan, though what's actually standing is a much later Church of Ireland building, raised in the 17th century and left to the weather after 1827. Head for the west doorway: the lintel carved with worn figures of clergy wasn't made for this church at all but lifted from an even older building on the same ground, a bit of medieval recycling hiding in plain sight. Duck inside and look for the grave slab of Magnus MacOrristin in the north-east corner - probably a Scottish gallowglass, one of the mercenary soldiers Gaelic lords imported from the Hebrides - carved on one side with a sword and, more unexpectedly, a hurl or camán on the other, which makes this one of the earliest bits of evidence for hurling (or something close to it) in Ireland; there's a cast of the stone in the GAA mu...
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Archaeology 360: Hill of Slane Friary, Co. Meath

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Approach from the east and Slane's hill looks unassuming for somewhere with this much claimed for it - it's the spot where, in AD 433, St Patrick is said to have lit the first Paschal fire in Ireland, in deliberate defiance of the High King's ban on rival fires while the court at Tara held its own festival some ten kilometres away (the two hills, conveniently for the story, can see each other). Patrick supposedly impressed the king enough to be let carry on preaching, and put one of the king's own men, Erc, in charge here as bishop - Erc founded a monastery on the hill in the 6th century and is said to be buried in the graveyard under two gable-shaped stones known as the Bishop's Tomb. Standing between the ruins of the Franciscan College and St Patrick's Church, you're on ground that's seen most of it: a round tower here was burned by Vikings in 948, a motte and bailey went up in the 1170s (its builder, Richard Fleming, killed along with more than a hund...
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Archaeology 360: Monasterboice Monastic Site, Co. Louth

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  You come in through the site entrance into a graveyard that's still in active use - centuries-old cross-slabs standing shoulder to shoulder with modern headstones - and the first thing that stops you is Muiredach's Cross, reckoned by most to be the finest high cross in Ireland. Walk its east face and you're looking at Old Testament scenes (Adam and Eve, David and Goliath among them); round to the west face and it switches to the New Testament, the Crucifixion and a Last Judgement, the whole thing carved - so the theory goes - by the same mason responsible for the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnoise, with a pair of cats playing at the base of the shaft for good measure. It's named for Muiredach, an abbot who died in the early 920s (923 or 924, depending which source you trust), and a scaled reproduction of this exact cross stands in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Circle the South Church - its north side, then in through the door, then back out the west -...
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Archaeology 360: Bective Abbey, Co. Meath

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Bective doesn't announce itself the way Tara does - you approach from the south-west across flat Boyne pastureland and the ruins seem almost modest, until you're inside them. This was Ireland's second Cistercian abbey, founded in 1147 by Murchad Ó Máel Sheachlainn, King of Meath, as a daughter house of Mellifont and, as it turned out, the only Cistercian house Meath ever got - its formal name, Abbatia de Beatitudine, translates roughly as the Abbey of Bliss. Work your way round the south-east and south-west corners and you're tracing the outer wall of what was once a much bigger complex; the site of the west range, where the lay brothers would have lived and worked, is now just a footprint in the grass, its buildings long gone. The cloister is the reason people come: rebuilt in the 15th century in Ardbraccan limestone, its arcade of gothic arches is carved with a small portrait of Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian order's founding voice, tucked into one of the pi...
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Archaeology 360: Hill of Tara, Co. Meath

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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 r...
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Archaeology 360: Bocan Stone Circle, Co. Donegal

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Swing your view around this 360 shot and you're standing on Bocan Hill above Culdaff, Inishowen, in the middle of what was once a formidable ring of standing stones - somewhere around thirty of them, if the early antiquarians are to be believed, though only seven still stand today, the rest toppled or broken by time, farming, or both. Look for the pair of tall entrance stones on the northwest side, still reaching close to two metres, and you'll get a sense of how imposing this circle - some 18-20 metres across, depending on whose tape measure you trust - must have been when whole. An 1816 report tells us diggers found graves and earthen urns tucked inside the ring, which is about as close as we get to knowing why it was built at all; officially it's filed under Bronze Age with a Neolithic whisper, and unofficially it's been dubbed a "sun temple," its axis reputedly lined up east-west towards Slieve Snaght and, on a clear day, all the way to Jura in Scotland. W...
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For the Attention of The Chief Archaeologist & Director of the National Museum of Ireland #TTM

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In 2019 The Keeper of Irish Antiquities threatened to send both the Director of the National Museum of Ireland and the Chief Archaeologist after me, but neither had sufficient backbone to either approach me or reprimand their errant employee. Now it's the back end of 2024 and there's still no end in sight. So I'm thinking it's time to resolve this. For this reason, I'm calling on  Michael MacDonagh , Chief Archaeologist at the National Monuments Service of Ireland, and Lynn Scarff , Director of the National Museum of Ireland, as well as the entire Board of the NMI ( here ) to show some forlorn modicum of actual leadership and reach out to me with a workable solution. I would point out that such a solution must include a full apology and retraction of the curel, hurtful, and simply untrue remarks made by  The Keeper of Irish Antiquities; answers to the questions repeatedly posed but unanswered by The Keeper of Irish Antiquities; as well as payment for my time in do...
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