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.