Marking the Occasion

We had a lot of visitors to the Boyne Valley in 2012. People from all over the place. Most of them will be celebrating the passing of the old Year and the coming of the new one. It is the nearest thing we have to a global holiday, apart from Paddys Day. So we decided to see what all these peoples would be up to.

In Latin America they wear lucky underwear. They do the same in Italy. In Spain, they eat twelve grapes at midnight and make a wish on each one. Fireworks are common in most countries but in Ecuador they burn scarecrows outside the houses. Scotland has the tradition of first-footing, which involves visiting houses and bringing items of luck with you. They also twirl giant balls of fire around their heads while parading around the streets. This sounds very Viking-like, and fun, but not as fun as Denmark. Denmark is one of the most progressive countries in Europe, but on New Years Eve they like to smash plates on their neighbours front doors. It is a sign of great pride and community standing if you have the biggest pile of broken dishes outside your door in Denmark. In Austria, they waltz to the Blue Danube. In America they watch a Waterford crystal ball descend into Times Square. In Germany, everyone has been watching the exact same tv show every year since 1972. In London, everyone jumps in the fountain in Piccadilly Circus. Another Latin American tradition in the big cities is to race around the block carrying luggage with you. This will apparently ensure lots of travel in the coming year.In Brazil on New Year’s Eve the priestesses of the local macumba voodoo cult dress in blue skirts and white blouses for a ceremony dedicated to the goddess of water, Yemanja. A sacrificial boat laden with flowers, candles and jewelery is pushed out to sea from the famous Ipenama beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Here in Ireland we are big on weird traditions to mark the calendar. Some people have to clean their houses to drive out the spirit of the old year. Others prefer to bang fresh bread on the walls, but if the Mammy caught us doing that she wouldn't be impressed, not after she cleaning the place. There was also something about entering through the front door and leaving through the back door but the Da would be shouting at us to shut the doors. There is still a tradition in rural areas of throwing holy water on the animals in the farmyard. There are also plenty of traditions about food. Some families leave an extra place at the table for those no longer with us. Others eat a plate of pickled herring.

The weirdest tradition in Ireland has to be in the village of portmagee in Kerry. In 17-something, a French ship landed down there and the sailors enacted a strange drama whereby they paraded through the village with an old gentleman and then they killed him so that he would be replaced by a young man. The locals had never seen anything like this before and since then they have been reenacting the same drama every year since.

In cold countries they have Polar Bear Dips, which involves jumping into the sea. This is what we will be doing in the morning. So, whatever you get up to, enjoy.

Credits

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear_plunge

http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/Irish-New-Year-traditions-that-span-the-centuries-112594784.html

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/world-our-backyard/2012/dec/31/11-unusual-new-years-eve-traditions-around-world/

Boggers

Living in the Boyne Valley, there is a tendency to spend a lot of time thinking about the neolithic, and giant rocks, and solstice alignments and important world heritage stuff like that.

So, when Bord na Mona turf-cutters came across a body in the bog near Kinnegad last Friday, I was delighted. Proper archaeology! Imagine finding something like that after breakfast. The body is now safely deposited in the National Museum where it will be examined further by experts. They should be able to establish the sex, the age and the cause of death of the body. They will probably be able to establish what the person had to eat and other interesting things about the life that it had before it ended up in the bog near Kinnegad.

The evidence is pointing towards the fact that this is a bog body. If it was a modern body, it would usually have synthetic materials such as polyester or jewellery and they would have survived with the body. Prehistoric people did not have access to jeans or tracksuits. Bog bodies are prehistoric burials that are widespread across Northern Europe and which appear to have been deliberately placed in watery conditions. However, the bodies do not decompose as they would normally. The acidic oxygen-free conditions in bogs are perfect for preserving human remains. The skin, hair and even stomach remains can be preserved, although bones tend to turn to goo after a while. While the dry conditions of the deserts kept the pharoahs intact and the ice of the Alps preserved Otzi the Iceman, in Ireland we have the bogs, and underneath them is a whole world of archaeology just waiting to be found. This bog has already been the site of numerous material remains, mostly trackways, but this is the first bog body found here. It is not the first time the Boyne Valley has been the resting place for a bog body though. Another one was found in 2003 and it too is up in the National Museum. He had a natty mowhawk hairdo which he liked to spike with pine resin. Not just ordinary pine resin, but the resin from a particular pine which only grows along the borders of Spain and France. Fancy.

But first let's talk about the bogs because they are crucial to the story. They are strange places, even to those of us who spend summers there. Raised bogs are a result of sudden and severe climate change. After the Ice Age, melted ice gathered in lakes in the interior of Ireland because of it's saucer shape. Plants and trees lived and died on the edge of these lakes. Then, sometime around the Bronze Age there was a major environmental change in Europe. It got wetter, and Ireland got wetter than most. We know this from environmental records in the bog. The trees started to disappear from the pollen record and the peat (dead trees) starts to pile up.

The question is, was it the importation of bronze which led to the cutting down of the trees? These new blades were perfect for chopping trees. Why the need for chopping down all the lovely trees? Well, the change in climate had already covered the uplands in blanket bog. It was useless for farming now. People needed land. People were under pressure to put food on the table, and across Europe, the old empires were falling. Bronze was also useful for something else - weapons which were specially designed to kill people instead of work. So, the bog bodies may have been connected with all this violence.

This is also the period when we start to see water deposits, in rivers, lakes and bogs. Some cultures deposit their wealth for safe-keeping during times of stress. Some do it to appease the gods. Some even do it to mark different territories between opposing groups. These deposits could be goods, or people.

There was also a change when iron was introduced. It appears that societies got even more violent now that they could make stronger swords and spears. The Iron Age in Ireland was always considered a period of huge displacement. There was very little settlement activity, although the excavations during the boom years are changing that picture. It did seem as if the whole country was on the move. The legends talk of invasions, kings, druids and warriors. This is the period that we find the majority of the bog bodies in Europe. The Roman senator, Tacitus, mentions that the Germanic people had a terribe habit of pinning their social outcasts down into bogs with wooden spikes. There is also the strange pattern with bog bodies being mutilated in some fashion. This happens in a lot of cases and we don't know if it happened before or after death.

So, there is lots of violence, catastrophic climate changes and bodies in the bogs. We also have the trackways. These are the wooden structures which were found near this body in Kinnegad bog. Trackways were another Iron Age feature in Northern Europe. Corlea Trackway in longford is the largest Irish example and it was built in 148 BC. They were wooden roads which led into watery landscapes. Only they did not seem to be designed for everyday transport. Trackways appear to be special constructions, used rarely and for purposes which we do not know. Perhaps they were used for a last journey.

All this, without a passage mound in sight.

Credits

http://www.heritagecouncil.ie/fileadmin/user_upload/INSTAR_Database/Climate_Change_and_Human_Activity_in_Wetlands_of_Ireland_Progress_Report_08.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/british_prehistory/human_sacrifice_01.shtml

Wood and Water

Last week we were off-river. For a change we were in the middle of a forest beside a lake, so we weren't totally on dry land. The location was Drewstown Woods and we were doing a High Ropes Intructor Course. A lovely spot, and all the Beech and Pine trees got me thinking about woodland and wetland archaeology, which is a bit of a contrast to the rolling green mounds and prehistoric art that you would normally associate with the Boyne Valley.

Hanging around

Something must have been in the air because this week saw the release of some amazing pictures from the Drumclay crannog in Fermanagh which was saved from the bulldozer by archaeologists. This got me thinking of the crannogs in the Boyne Valley. Crannogs get their name from the irish for "tree" and they were usually built by driving large wooden piles into waterlogged areas and then building up the interior with brushwood, peat, stones and soil to create an artificial island. Architecturally, lake dwelling spaces are a worldwide phenomenon and are still in use in some cultures today. There are over 1500 of them listed in Ireland. Two of the best known are located in the Boyne Valley.
Moynagh Lough is located near Nobber on the edge of a former lake by the River Dee. It was excavated during the 80s and evidence was found from prehistoric periods along with early history. However, it was the early medieval period (700-900AD) that produced the most evidence for settlement. A range of high status items such as brooches were found here and they were created from different materials including gold, bronze, jet, amber, glass, horn and iron. Some of these items were found in the waste disposal area of the site so there was obviously plenty of material going spare. The presence of bowl furnaces also suggest that this crannog was used for the mass production of objects and many of these were ecclesiastical in nature. Due to the anaerobic conditions of the site there was also a great many items discovered which would normally not survive in the record, such as leather shoes and wooden utensils. Sites like this tell us a lot about everyday life back then because during that period, pottery was rare in Ireland.

Drewstown Lake

On the other side of the Boyne Valley is another famous crannog. Lagore is located near Dunshaughlin and according to the historical sources, this was the home of the Southern Brega who were a warlike bunch that liked nothing better than persecuting the Norsemen in Dublin and the Northern Brega based at Knowth. The evidence found at Lagore include iron slave collars, drinking containers made from human skulls and more iron than bronze. They also liked to use human bones in the foundations of the island, and these may have been workers that paid the ultimate sacrifice. Industrial activity from Lagore was primarily agricultural with ploughs, spindles and game pieces turning up.

Drinking Horns from Moynagh Lough Crannog

So, in a time when there were no towns in Ireland, we have people organising the building of wooden stilted settlements near water. The evidence suggests that they were located here for particular reasons. They may have been to do with manufacturing, or status, or defence. The ongoing work in Fermanagh will hopefully build on what we have learned in the Boyne Valley.
In the meantime, I have some branches to chop.
Credits
Crannogs
Scott, B G 1978 `Iron 'slave-collars' from Lagore Crannog, Co Meath' Proc Roy Ir Acad C 78, 1978 213-30,
Bradley J. Excavations at Moynagh Lough County Meath, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Vol. 121, (1991), pp. 5-26

Infographic

Halloween

Halloween, or Samhain (Summers End) in the Boyne Valley was originally celebrated as the end of the old year and like a modern day New Years Eve, it is a bit difficult to decide which is the best party to go to on the night. While the urban areas of the Boyne Valley see the continuation of old rituals such as fires, guising (costumes), divination (apple bobbing) and mischief (teenagers roaming the streets), the rural areas are just as busy.

This is not a new phenomenon. Ireland was a rural landscape up until the 20th century and this time of the year is important for country people. The animals would be brought in from the fields. Slaughtering would take place and feasts would be had to fatten up for the dark cold nights coming. This was the last chance to gather fruits or grains before the frosts killed them and the land descended into darkness. Travelling workers returned to their own families. Fires were lit. And of course, the fairy folk were able to slip through the veil between the worlds without the usual spiritual immigration laws that operated the rest of the year.

Up at Loughcrew, the passage mound at Carnbane L has an unusual standing stone within it which is illuminated by the sunrise at Samhain. Cairn U is also supposed to be aligned with the sunrise. The Mound of the Hostages on Tara is another landscape marker aligned with the Samhain sunrise and like Carnbane L, there was a standing stone at its entrance up until the 19th century.

The Mound of the Hostages dates from the neolithic and there is a lot of archaeological evidence for a ring of fire pits around it. The earliest historical records from here mention the lighting of the fires at Tara to signal the start of the New Year. Everyone waited for the signal from Tara, but the high king at Tara got his signal from the druids at Tlachtga, which goes by the name of the Hill of Ward today. While Tara was seen as the political capital, Tlachtga was seen as the spiritual centre for the druids and it is there where the biggest party was last night.

Flame torches and flourescent lights circled this unusual multi-ditched site while a procession made its way up from the fair green in Athboy. Modern day druids rubbed shoulders with Wiccan practitioners and children in masks and elderly farmers out to mark All Hallows Eve, the christian version. There was even a film crew from Korea and when the ritual pageant of the story of Tlachtga started I kept expecting Halloween "Gangnam" style but it was a classy affair, about Tlachtgas search for knowledge and the idea of sharing that knowledge rather than using it to control others. Nice sentiments, followed by tea and crisps.

This mix of different styles and old tales is typical of Tlachtga. Ongoing remote sensing surveys on the hill are revealing that there is a lot more going on under the ground than we can see. There are only three sites like Tlachtga in Ireland and one of them is the Rath of the Synods in Tara so there definitely seems to be a link with the royal site here. Whatever it was originally used for (nobody even knows if the hill of Ward is actually Tlachtga!), it still draws a crowd on Halloween.

Credits

knowth.com

wikipedia

newgrange.com

ucd

tlachtga

Image credit

facebook

facebook

shadowsandstone.com

The Romans of the Boyne Valley

With the news this week that a roman statue of Hercules was found in the National Museum after being missing for over a hundred years and it turns out that it was originally found in the Boyne river near Navan, the question is raised again about whether or not the Romans ever came to Ireland. Coincidently, the Discovery Programme are hosting an international conference this weekend about the Romans in ireland, so the find is well-timed and should get the archaeologists rubbing their trowels with happiness.

While Roman artifacts are rare enough, they do pop up quite a lot in the Boyne Valley and all along the East Coast. It seems that the peoples of the Mediterranean were quite knowledgeable about this area during the period when Rome was a superpower. The first recorded historical reference to the Boyne was on a map in a museum in Alexandria by the philosopher Ptolemy which dates from around 150AD. This map was very accurate (even though it referred to Boyne as Buvinda) and it would have probably have been drawn by Phoenician traders.

The Roman historian, Tacitus, referred to Ireland as being easily invaded by just one legion, yet unlike the rest of Europe, there is no military or even settlement activity discovered yet.

Plenty of trade though. Apparently, the Romans were fond of our wolfhounds. Pottery dredged from the Boyne and from Collierstown have been traced back to Syria and Turkey and they were most likely used for transporting oil and wine. Artifacts found at Tara suggest that there was a Roman trading post here during the Iron Age. At the entrance to Newgrange were found high status Roman coins that were deliberatley deposited there, raising the suggestion that the mound was an international pilgrimage site for them. There was also a roman brooch found in a holywell at Randalstown which was probably another votive deposit.
Burial-wise, there are some definite Roman examples along the east coast. Cremations in Kilkenny are similar to the romano-british style from around 100AD. In Bettystown in the 70s, some very strange burials were found. They were treated differently than others in the area and with the progress in geochemistry in recent years we can tell lots more about these bodies now. Isotope analysis of their tooth enamel places this person as growing up in a very specific part of North Africa around 500AD. You have to remember that the empire was made up of a melting-pot of different ethnic groups at the time. Citizens included visitors from across the Irish Sea and they would have been quite different than the toga wearing beaurocrats we normally think about when we talk about Rome. Patrick was one of those citizens and despite the lack of traditional Roman archaeology found here, christianity was a direct import from Rome to Ireland. So the question is not what the romans have ever done for us, it is more what were they doing here while they were here.

Sources

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Ptolemy_Cosmographia_1467_-_Ireland.jpg

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/1017/1224325323956.html

http://irisharchaeology.ie/2011/11/roman-contacts-with-ireland/

Raftery, B. 1994 Pagan Celtic Ireland: the enigma of the Irish Iron Age. Dublin.

Waddle, J. 1998 The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland, Wordwell, Dublin.

Best thing since before sliced bread...

This week saw the sad closing of one of the Boyne Valleys oldest food processing companies, Spicers Bakery. Navan is where the Blackwater and the Boyne meet and this mix of rushing water has been used for centuries to power different industries, and perhaps the most important of these were the water-mills. The first water-mill in Ireland was supposedly built by King Cormac Mac Art in the Boyne Valley in the 2nd century AD. His favourite concubine was in the bad books with his jealous wife and she was ordered to grind the grain for the whole royal site of Tara. This is why Cormac had the mill built. These were revolutionary machines when you think that rural people still used the more ancient stone quern method of grinding grain into flour right up until the early 20th century. Mills were referred to by historians as "the backbone of Irish industry". Although the present Spicers bakery  was originally the cornstore for the mill, it is still an impressive building. It is a detached six bay four story construction with exposed rubble walls that are whitewashed and which dates from the 1860s.

The mill itself was converted to apartments during the last boom era and it is ironic that it was built in a previous boom. At the time (1785) it was one of the biggest mills in Ireland and it required a considerable amount of capital investment to build these. Records show that there were ten pairs of stones in the original mill, six for wheat and four for oats. The video below shows a typical working water powered flour mill from the Blackwater area.

This large investment was low-risk because bread was fast becoming the staple diet for the new urban workers during the industrial revolution. Before that, bread had been a luxury. The Napoleonic Wars also meant that Britain was dependent on Ireland for its bread. This was why the Irish parliament offered 3d per mile to transport flour to Dublin. This was over twice the price for wheat. Meath was the first county to start sending flour to the capital and this helped its transport infrastructure grow. The Boyne Navigation Canal is a good example of this and it was owned by Spicers until the 1960s. Milling was a profitable business during the 19th century, with over 2500 recorded as being built between 1835 and 1850 in Ireland. There was a downside to this though. Millers wanted all local grinding to be carried out in their mills. That is why we find so many smashed stone querns reused in stone walls and dumped for archaeologists to find. The milling industry also demanded economic protection from the cheap imports which were being processed in the giant mills of Chicago and the American West. This they got, courtesy of the Corn Laws, and they made a killing from it. Unfortunately, the corn laws were not such a good idea during the famine. Eventually, cheap white bread began to flood the market in the 1880s and this heralded the death knell of the mills.
Spicers changed from a mill to a bakery in 1880 and they had depots in Trim and Balbriggan aswell. During the 1970s they employed over 300 people and generations of Loreto convent girls who went to school across the road from the bakery have never forgotten memories of the smell of fresh bread while they studied.

The Trim Incident

This weekend in 1920 was busier than normal in Trim.
The War of Independence was in full swing and the IRA were concentrating on attacking RIC barracks. The Royal Irish Constabulory were the main method of control in Ireland by the British government at the time and the barracks in Trim was a formidable establishment. It had over 20 men stationed there and contained guns, ammunition and grenades. It was located in what is now the Castle Arch Hotel and it had walls and steel gates that were over 15ft high.

The Meath IRA hatched a plan to attack the barracks on Sunday because they knew that half of them would be gone to mass. The IRA was very active in this area and one of the Lalor brothers had already single handedly attacked a truckload of soldiers at the Wellington monument
They blocked off the roads to Trim, captured the constables in the church and attacked the barracks. Only one constable tried to stop them and he was shot in the lung. Then the building was burned down using oil that they brought with them. The IRA escaped and went into hiding. One of them was said to have hid in a freshly dug grave.

They had to hide because they knew that the Black and Tans would arrive soon. The British government had a strategy for dealing with guerilla warfare since the Boer War. Reprisals. Four lorries of Black and Tans arrived and shot into a crowd hurling on the fair green, injuring two boys, George Griffen and James Kelly. The local priest and town leaders intervened and pleaded with the auxillaries not to take it out on the town. They drove off but returned in the early hours of the morning. This is when the madness started.
Witnesses say that the town was left looking like something from the war-fields of France. A quarter of the buildings were burned, including J&E Smyths, right beside where our premises are now located, and the town hall with all the town records. Soldiers waved grenades in front of windows where children hid. For years afterwards, children were forbidden to play with toy guns in the street because so many of them were traumatised. Many of the townsfolk left their homes and hid down by the river, rather than suffer the reprisals.

The looting and burning by the Black and Tans was reported in the New York Times and on the British Pathe newsreel. It had two significant consequences. The IRA in Meath became the centre of the Eastern force in Ireland, and General Crozier, the leader of the Auxillary British Forces, was forced to resign over the actions of his forces in what was called the Trim Incident.After the War of Independence, quite a few of the volunteers that took part on the raid of the RIC barracks went on to join the newly formed police force, An Garda Siochana

Mountain of the Witch

This weekend we travelled north of the Boyne to visit Sliabh na Cailleach, which has some of the oldest free standing monuments in the world. Otherwise known as Lough Crew, the dates from the mounds place us in the neolithic (about 3200BC), although there is evidence from the mesolithic here also. Lough Crew is the lesser known of the four great neolithic passage mound landscapes in Ireland, but it has an equal range of monuments, from passage mounds to standing stones and stone circles. Bru na Boinne is where the tourists flock to but there are many who prefer the quiet loneliness of Lough Crew. Carrowmore and Carrowkeel rise dramatically out of the Sligo landscape overlooking the Atlantic, but Lough Crew appears to be gentle, leading some commentators to reflect on its feminine style.

Like many other monuments in the Boyne valley, it is not high. Cairn T, at 276m above sea level, is about a ten minute climb from the car park below. It is still the highest point in Meath and the views from here this weekend, take in 18 counties. You can see here from Tara on a good day. Indeed, cairn T is noticeable from all around and, like Newgrange, it was originally covered in quartz. You wouldn't have missed it in the landscape. You would be forgiven for thinking that you are much higher. Neolithic hill landscapes are like that. They maximise their height effect and the hilltops here often rise out of the mists below like they were reaching through clouds. Archaeologists refer to them as "islandscapes". There is a possibility that places like this were more associated with the sky than the land, and this is obvious with cairn T.

Lough Crew is made up of a range of hills but everyone is visiting Cairn T this weekend because it is the time of the Autumn Equinox and the backstone in this cairn will be lit by the rising sun. This is the time of the year when the sun moves around the sky at great speed, unlike the more relaxed way it hangs in the sky during the solstices. There are exactly twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night during the equinox. This is when the kids start to grumble that it is getting dark in the mornings. From here on in, the days get noticeably shorter and this is traditionally the last chance to bring in the harvest. Any later than this and you run the risk of the crops rotting in the cold ground. The sillstones and passage of the mound carves out the sunlight into a rectangle shape which moves around the backstone as the sun moves in the sky. The famous equinox stone is covered in megalithic art and the light seems to follow the flower designs more than any others. There are also serpentine forms, spirals and cupmarks that appear to have been formed by rubbing stone balls into holes. The theories about the art tell us more about the theorists than the truth but the similarities between the art here and other ancient cultures such as the native Americans or the Australians is obvious.

The cairn was supposedly the burial place of Ollamh Fodhla, the great lawgiver King of Tara. There is doubt about that but it is definitely associated with the cailleach, or the veiled one. Modern western society would class a cailleach as a witch but it could have just as easily meant a wise woman. Local legend (and I always go with that) states that the cairns were formed when the cailleach was jumping across the hills with stones in her apron in order to achieve great power. More likely, the cailleach is the Irish triple goddess made up of the maiden, the mother and the bone lady. A megalith on the north side of the passage mound is called the Hags Chair and this is where she liked to sit and look out over her territory to the North.

This could have just been agricultural legends based on the coming change of the seasons, or it may actually have been based on a strong local female personality from prehistory. Burials associated with the Cailleach Beara in Munster are predominantly female so there may have been a tradition of strong female leaders back then. The hills of Sliabh na Cailleach, like those of the Kerry Paps, lend themselves to the shapes of breasts, so they could also have been used to refer to the earth goddess. There are many theories out there. What do you think?

Leccy Piccy

All roads led to Laois last weekend for the fantastic Electric Picnic and this made us think of Tara. All roads used to lead there. Not the Tara of the beautiful harp and the seat of the High Kings, more the Tara of the drum and the seat of your bum sitting in a field with a bunch of people you haven’t seen all year. We swapped our buoyancy aids for sleeping bags and canoes for tents and made our annual journey across dry land to join the picnicers, while Dara held the fort back in Trim. While sitting in the Body and Soul area looking at all the ancient crafts and healers, we got to thinking about prehistoric festivals in the Boyne Valley.

Tara would have been the place to be in Ireland since around the Neolithic. There is a passage mound here, with megalithic art and evidence of cremations, ritual fire pits and later bronze age inhumations. Smack ontop of a hill with view for miles around and the evidence of continuous use would mean that this would have been going since God was young. Or if not, at least thousands of years before Christ. Geophysical explorations have shown that there was many other mounds here aswell AND a giant wooden henge. Bronze age ring barrows dot the landscape. These are raised burial circles as big as a house with huge ditches dug around them and banks piled up high. Not your average gravestones. A 500m long sunken causeway runs up the hill towards the mounds, with gaps in its banks so different parts of the landscape are visible as visitors move towards the top.

The Iron Age landscape is even more magnificent with internal ditches, while there is evidence of exotic foreign visitors both in the burials and in the artifacts found there which look like they would have been used by roman traders. The great Irish chieftains and kings were supposedly chosen here, the ones who ruled when the stories of Fionn MacCumhaill and Cu Chulainn were first told.

This was the sort of place where world changing events occurred. Big news. Rulers were born, fell in love, got into battles and died, and often came back to life. It was that sort of place. When Patrick arrived back in Ireland he supposedly came to Tara to fight the druids for the right to be the spiritual leader of the people, although there is doubt about that, but we will let him have his claim to fame. It was the stuff of legend, but all that is left now are these amazing earthworks with views that go on and on, and which the local kids delight in running up and down on. Noone knows what really went on here. Archaeologists will tell you one thing while the druids will tell you another, and to be honest, we are not all that interested. Most likely it was the usual tension between powers. Whether it was Daniel O Connell and his monster meetings for Catholic Emancipation or the annual midsummer ceremonies by new age believers, Tara has been the backdrop for all the changes in Ireland. What is more important is that this is where people came to meet with each other for thousands of years.

Just like Body and Soul and MindFields, the 19th century antiquarians gave each space in Tara a dedicated name, such as Teach Cormac or the Banqueting Hall and these names have confused tourists for generations who come looking for houses and courts and the front door of magnificent celtic castles that never existed. What is there, is a landscape that appears to have been specifically designed to hold very large gatherings of people. Every dip and hill up there is placed so that people can see each other and move around in crowds. The majority were probably more interested in catching up with old friends and having the crack than in what the hobnobs were doing.

So next time you are in the Boyne Valley and plan to visit the Hill of Tara, imagine it thronged with revellers, banging their drums and wandering round doing fun things that they normally wouldn’t do.

Lughnasa in the Boyne Valley

August is coming to a close and we have been out on the water pretty much every day this month, testing out our new whitewater rafts and bringing visitors up and down the Boyne. No surprise as the Boyne Valley has just been voted the most popular tourist destination in Ireland! In the meantime we have had the Olympics and the festival of Lughnasa, both of which have links with the Boyne. Before the Olympics there was an even more ancient games in the Boyne Valley. It was called the Aoenach Tailteann to commemorate the goddess Tailtiu. She cleared the land for agriculture so that the first farmers could plant their seeds and build their magnificent monuments.

A modern day Tailtiu?

As we paddle through the valley we can see that the landscape is changing. The crops in the fields are being cut and made ready to be brought in. This was when Tailtiu's foster son, Lugh, the king of the Tuatha de Danann, killed his grandfather, Balor of the evil eye. While this story from the Book of Invasions was probably linked to agriculture with the weakening of the strong summer sun and the crops being harvested, it is also similar to the Mediterranean festival of Neptunalia which was a time to take a break from work and take to the waters. Later on, the Christian faith turned Balor into Crom Dubh and Lugh into St Patrick. These legends then got the hollywood treatment in the Twentieth century when they were turned into Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

While the festival of lughnasa is celebrated throughout Ireland, mostly on hilltops, in Meath it is strongly associated with water. To this day in the Boyne Valley we see lots of people who do the rounds of the many holy wells in the area. These were probably linked with a water cult in prehistoric times and there is a long tradition in Ireland of placing objects in water as sacred deposits. In Christian times, the monks used the wells and rivers for baptisms and for keeping fish, so they have always been special places in the landscape. Some of them are associated with omens for the coming year while still others are supposed to have cures for ailments such as warts and backaches. Most of these wells also have fairy trees nearby and their branches are festooned with offerings. Of course, the Boyne itself also featured heavily in the traditions. At Lughnasa, horses were bathed at night at Stackallen, while farmers would drive their cattle into the Boyne at Trim in the nineteeenth century to avoid disease. For those who were more interested in human affairs than livestock, Lughnasa gave the opportunity to try out a new partner in a handfastening which would last a year and a day.
In the meantime we are having a quick break and a cup of tea before the next group of intrepid explorers arrive !

Trim Castle

As part of an effort to update our blog we are going to be posting a bit about some of the things to be seen on our river trips through the Boyne Valley. Right beside our base in Trim is one of the largest Norman castles in Europe. When Hollywood wanted a real castle to film Braveheart in, this is where they set up their cameras.

With its huge curtain walls, limestone base batter and impressive keep, this is exactly what we think of when we imagine life in medieval times. It appears to be the ideal picture of a defensive Norman castle, permanently ready for military activities.You can imagine knights in armour training for battle inside these walls while soldiers pour boiling oil on anyone foolish enough to try and enter. How else would the invading forces keep the peace amongst the unruly Gaels? Certainly there is plenty of evidence for violence within its walls. Decapitated bodies have been found during excavations. The architecture does lend itself to defense and the annals tell us that Rory O' Connor burnt the original wooden castle down before De Lacy built the stone one in the twelfth century. So far, so good. However, in reality, you wouldn't go wasting oil on people in medieval times. This is a myth. Oil was a precious commodity that the Normans traded from the mediteranean over to the Irish Sea and up the Boyne. The majority of people who lived inside the castle were clerks and beaurocrats, not knights. Although every Norman lord was trained in warfare, De Lacy himself was an international diplomat and a businessman, and he preferred money to military glory. He was sent over to stop the other Normans from fighting amongst themselves after Strongbow died. Trim was his administrative centre, which was part of his plan to attract traders and merchants from all over Europe to here. He achieved this aim by creating one of the first experiments in urban planning with merchants renting plots along the new straight streets that the free town council laid out. He had a mint here and he kept all the land records and deeds for the whole of Ireland here rather than in Dublin.

When it came to battle, The Irish preferred running open skirmishes across the fields. Sieges were the only strategy that worked against castles and the Irish were too impatient for that approach. This is if we are talking about the upper classes. When it came to ordinary working Irish people, there is a good possibility that the Irish people did not care whether it was the Gaels or the Normans that was ruling them. While the curtain walls and base batter were originally defenseive features in castles, they are also fashionable features. Castles were built by masons and they had a repertoire of architectural styles which they followed, just like we have features like pvc facia and double glazed windows today. So the defensive features could well have been there to impress. Not everything is about knights fighting.

Take the Barbican gate, which is unique in Ireland. It appears to have acted purely as a defensive entrance and it certainly did, with its double wooden gates, portcullis, murder holes and battlements. It is not unique in Europe though. The Barbican is a replica of the entrance to the De Lacy ancestral castle in Poitou in France. To the French lords and ladies that lived in the castle, this would have made them feel completely at home. The eight sided keep is also unique but it most certainly was not defensive as each side made them extra vulnerable. It may even have been built to reference the eight sided christian cross of its layout.

The keep only had one exit. Any schoolboy playing "castle" will tell you that this is not a good idea if you want to get away from your attackers. So, Trim Castle – military outpost or medieval administrative centre? Come downriver with us for a look yourself and make your own mind up.