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.

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.

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 !