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

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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.

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.