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.
