Battles of the Boyne

Today we were in full battle mode in Boyne Valley Activities. It was all hands on deck as we had a few trips downriver to organise. First on the agenda was our Boyne Valley Landscape Tour. Seeing as today is July 12, we had to stop at Rossnaree Ford and rest for a while to take in the surroundings. This was the site of not one, but two decisive battles in Irish history.
The first battle of the boyne is mentioned in the Tain Bo Cualigne and it involved the shamed King of Ulster marching on Tara after Queen Maeve stole his prize bull. Legend has it that Rossnaree Ford is where the main confrontation took place. This makes sense. In the age before maps and roads, people used the landscape features to mark out boundaries, and the Boyne has always divided the North and South in Ireland. The King of Tara lost his head here, courtesy of some fancy spear work from Cu Chulainn who ran across the ford to win the battle.

Williamites vs Jacobites

Jump ahead 2000 years and you have another army marching on the south from Ulster. This battle in 1690 involved soldiers from all over Europe. It was fought between William and his father-in-law James for control of Europe. It was the largest battle ever fought on Irish soil and the fields around here still throw up military artifacts. Instead of spears, this time they used muskets and cannons. In this hot weather, with the water levels extremely low, you can see how General Schomberg would have chosen this spot to cross and flank the Jacobite troops. They met at a boggy ravine at Sheepgrange and stood facing each other, unable to advance. Meanwhile William took his chance and crossed at Oldbridge. This was the last time that kings faced each other on the battle field. After that they left it to the poor soldiers to do the fighting on their behalf.

In the afternoon, we had another medieval river tour of Trim. After a quick walk around the deserted ruins of SS Peter & Paul we hopped back into the kayaks and  finished off at the Priory of St John the Baptist. This 13th century hospital had its main keep added later as a private residence. After the Battle of the Boyne, King William confiscated the building and granted it to one of his soldiers. This was common practise throughout the valley and it had a big impact on land ownership. In this case, the soldier did not stay. It is recorded that he spent one night in the residence and had such nightmares that he left the very next day. Hopefully our tourist amenities are a bit more welcoming nowadays.

Hospital of St John the Baptist, Newtown

Finally, we got suited and booted for the late afternoons activities. We had a paintball battle starting at our new course in the centre of the town. After all that talk of ancient history we were in the mood for a bit of action and there is nothing like running about the place shooting at each other with paint pellets to get a full understanding of historical warfare.
Who won this battle? Like most battles, it depends who you ask. It is still being disputed in a beer garden somewhere.

History being made

Game of Ruins

After the success of our Float through Time Historical River Tour (Slane to Newgrange) we wondered if we could do a similar job on our homebase in Trim. At first we were unsure. Trim Castle overshadows everything in the town and there is already a tour running in there, which we highly recommend. However, we had the same concern with Newgrange and there turned out to be a whole lot more to Bru na Boinne than one monument, so we pressed on.

We also had the added disadvantage of growing up here. We tend to walk past stone ruins and think of them as places to walk through on the way somewhere else. This is something that only a Trim-head can understand. While tourists stop and photograph everything, we just carry on.
Our Newgrange tour covers about 6000 years through a World Heritage landscape, so there is no shortage of stories and monuments to show and tell there. The majority of the features in Trim are from the medieval period,  from about 450AD to 1600AD.  During that period they had wheels and money and even America. To prehistorians like us, that is practically last week.
So we had to dig deep to find the story. Luckily there were plenty of excavation reports. During the boom years, archaeology in Trim multiplied tenfold compared to previous decades, so the picture most of us have of the town is often based on old ideas. Yes, there were knights and lords and saints, and they have a habit of hogging the headlines of the historical records with their big decisions and battles and treaties. However, the real story is the town itself, how it changed from a highly sophisticated multi-ethnic society into a radical experiment in community self-government that appeared in pockets of feudal Europe during the middle ages. Throw in a few hundred years of competition between different groups of religious folk and the place starts to become like something out of Game of Thrones. While there are no record of dragons in Trim, it was definitely the place to be if you fancied an interesting life.

Give us a shout if you fancy learning more.

Big Rock

While the lads were busy with a river trip yesterday, I got out of the Boyne Valley and headed south to the Barrow River and its flat lowlands for a change of scenery. About 6000 years ago, people in this area constructed one of the largest megalithic monuments of its type in Europe and I wanted to check it out. The Brownshill Portal Tomb, or the Kernanstown Cromlech as it is known locally, is situated 3km outside Carlow town on the face of a slight rise. From the road, it looks disappointing. No matter which way you approach this monument, it does not look like much, until you get close to it.

Even when close to it, it is hard to appreciate the scale of this site. Only when I put a person in the picture could I get an idea of how big that capstone really was. It is a big rock! They reckon that it weighs between 100 -150 tonnes. It sits on two upright stones which would have acted as an entrance (the portal) and as such they are similar to court-tombs in that respect. This site also has a blocking stone between the door and this too is common enough in portal tombs. It would also have probably had side stones aswell and it looks like they would have collapsed over time. The capstone, like others, balances on low stones at the back and it ascends upwards to sit on the front uprights. How they managed to put them there is a good question. Monuments like this appear to have been built earlier than passage tombs and again, there is evidence of burial activity, but there is no way of knowing how long the stones were there before the burial took place. Like passage tombs, these monuments were originally covered by a cairn so all you would have seen was the entrance and the mound.
We have no idea why portal tombs follow this fashion. They come in a range of shapes and sizes. They can be spectacular like this one. They can be small and dumpy or tall and skinny. Some look just like a pile of rocks. Some have double capstones balanced on top. Others appear to be like modern sculptures, almost animal-like. Most sites have definitely been used and reused for burials over time, from at least the Neolithic times. Not all of them have burial evidence though, so there is the possibility that they were territorial markers. Some of them also have an alignment with the sun. This particular monument has never been excavated so its mystery remains, but if its size was anything to go by, it marks something or someone important.

Like most prehistoric monuments in Ireland, there is a lot of folklore associated with them. In historical times they were known as the Beds of Diarmuid and Grainne. Some of them have fortune-telling customs connected to them while others were used as dance spots. While these enigmatic monuments attract visitors from all over the world, Ireland is not the only country to have them. They appear in mainland Europe at the same time, along with Russia and India.
However, if you really want to go somewhere with a lot of these monuments, skip Carlow and head to Korea. There you will find the greatest concentration of them in the world.

St Patrick in the Boyne Valley

We have been mad busy with our rope courses and getting ready for the new season, so it has been a while since we paid attention to the archaeology of the Boyne Valley. With the weekend that it is, we did a little digging. Turns out he was so frequent a visitor here back in the 5th century that we would have done him a deal for a few trips on the river.

There are so many legends about Patrick that many people can be forgiven for thinking he was a mythological character, but he was as real as the next person. His own writings survive still and they are the earliest records of a slave in the time of the Roman empire. If that is not impressive enough he is also the first person in history that we know actually existed in Ireland. Yet, he wasn't Irish. He started off as a slave in the west, but he pointed his boat in the direction of the Boyne Valley when he made the return visit. Dublin at this time was only a twinkling in the eye of some distant Vikings, so he headed for Colpe at the mouth of the Boyne. The Boyne allowed Patrick to progress into the heart of the land and also to make his mark on a few of the main power centres in the country. Tara, as a royal site, was top of his list. Although there is no definite record of him ever actually being on the hill, there are plenty of stories about Tara coming to him. Apparently, the druids were expecting this crazy new preacher and they feared that their time as the spiritual teachers of the people was coming to an end. When Patrick lit the Easter fire on a hilltop in the Boyne Valley (probably Knowth or Slane) to herald the birth of the new god, this was in direct opposition to the political custom of the time and he knew that it would be like a slap in the face to Tara. An almighty row started with druids directing thunderbolts and all sorts of weird magic at him. This was no bother to Patrick and he eventually wiped out everyone who refused to kneel before him. It was like a Jedi Knight taking on a load of Sith Lords and kicking ass. This was also where he first used the shamrock to demonstrate the trinity. At least that is the way his 7th century biographer-monk described it. This is the problem with Patricks' story. He had the early medieval equivalent of a facebook page bigging up every move that he made. The truth was probably a bit more mundane.

Patrick was a practical man. The Roman church had already sent a bishop to Ireland to tend to the scattered Christians but Palladius had not left much of a mark apart from a few references in ecclesiastical records. Early medieval society was extremely hierarchical and segmented and Patrick needed to get his foot in the door of the Tuath tribal system because they controlled the people. He needed the protection and influence of the Tuath kings and the Boyne Valley was a hotspot for them. If he could convert the kings, the rest would follow suit. It was trickle-down religion, although he also made a point of converting slaves and low born. He sent his nephew Lomman upriver to convert Fedelmid, the king at the crossing point there. This community became the town of Trim. The Cathedral Church of St Patrick there stands on the site of the early church which rivals Armagh as the oldest Patrician church in Ireland. This focus on creating communities was influenced by his time spent in the new monasteries in France and this is seen as the start of the so-called proto-towns in Ireland.

Patrick was not expected to have much success and in his lifetime he did not view himself as being successful. Ireland was considered at best, the edge of the known world, and at worst, the entrance to hell (Lough Derg in Donegal). His family and friends were not impressed with his mission. There were plenty of easier gigs for a churchman at the time. Todays' equivalent would be to volunteer to go to Mars. He spent most of his time trying to stop his newly christianised people from being killed by raiders and it pained him that Briton traders did the most damage because they did not view Patricks' converts as being worthy. He was successful because he knew the language and he incorporated the pagan religion into Christianity. He would have been well aware that the people worshipped the Boyne as a living god so he used the river for baptism because it  involved full immersion back then. He also used the natural springs and wells in the valley and they would have had spiritual associations from pre-Christian times. There are numerous St Patricks' Wells in the Boyne Valley and they all claim a connection from his travels throughout the county.
The communities did flourish, although not quite as rapidly as his social media marketeers would lead you to believe. We know from the archaeology of burials throughout the Boyne Valley that Christianity was a gradual process. Still, within the space of two generations, Ireland was sending monks back out into Europe who transformed the religion. Over 1500 years later his name is trending worldwide every March 17. Not bad for a visitor.


References
Meath

Irelandnow

Pilgrimagemedievalireland

Voxhiberionacum

Askaboutireland

Image Credits
http://ansionnachfionn.com/2012/06/25/irish-national-heritage-park-no-irish/
http://sothl.com/