The Hill of Tara

[Gil]

Proposals to build a controversial new motorway through the Hill of Tara in Co Meath will be discussed in detail next week by the Oireachtas joint Committee on Local Government.

At issue is whether the proposed road should be built with or without a proper archaeological dig of the locality.

A number of experts will be questioned about the level of archaeology in the area.

Chairman of the Committee Sean Haughey TD has said that he is hopeful all concerned will have a say before a decision is reached.

He said that a number of archaeologists have already met the Committee in the last two weeks to outline their concerns about the site.

This week Dr Patrick Wallace Director of the National Museum and Dr Bernard Lacey of the Discovery Programme and various personnel from the Heritage Council will meet with the Committee.

Source

And another article here

[Milesian]

Yeah, I've already signed the online petition against it with some others.
It would be appreciated if others could too

http://www.tara-skryne.org/index-help.html


*EDIT: Actually, just noticed the deadline has passed

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

It sounds like they are not doing the right thing.

[Milesian]

No, they aren't

To even consider building a motorway through an archaeological complex that pre-dates Stonehenge by 1000 years and the Pyramids by 500 years is a disgrace. The place is a national treasure, hugely symbolic and is a great asset to historians and archaelogists.

The damage that could be caused will be immeasurable.
But I suppose if it helps the economy and it doesn't upset the immigrants, then there is no reason to oppose it. It's only Irish history afterall

[Ebusitanus]

Crap like taht happens everywhere. Those construction firms, logically, do not want to find anything for it would cause the whole proyect to freeze. Often enough, even if a construction workers does find something while they are bulldozing, managment slips a few extra bucks his way and keep up the schedule.

If they dont want to dig its because they know there will be stuff found.

Just the other day they found in Athens some statue in a road ditch, presumably found at some construction work and, with a bit more historic feeling, instead of sold ilegally or kept home, dropped of there for someone to find it and turn in over to the authorities. Who knows what else got destroyed at that construction site?

[Gil]

The problem is not the construction firm, those guys would gladly build around the site because that would mean more money to them! It's the government officials who want to curtail on the amount they have to pay so they made the road route in a line!

[Alkman]

Royal Tara Under Threat



Tara. Its very name evokes the majesty of ancient Pagan Ireland. Royal seat of Ireland's High Kings for millenia, Tara has a unique place in Irish history. The front-page headline in the Washington Post on Saturday, January 22, thus came as a nasty shock: “In Ireland, Commuters vs. Kings: Road Plan Clashes with Protection of Ancient Tara”. A four-lane highway planned to cut through an ancient Pagan site?? How could the Irish road planners possibly contemplate such a route?

Tara is home to the Irish Pagan Gods and Goddesses. Tara is an entrance to the Celtic Otherworld, the realm of Faeries and Ancestors. Many of the archaeological sites surrounding the main hill are Pagan-era tombs. Putting a highway through Tara is like putting a highway through Egypt's Valley of the Kings, or the Vatican.

Rituals have been performed at Tara for 6000 years. The Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny upon which 142 Kings of Ireland were crowned, is part of Tara, along with Rath Lugh, a massive hillside fort. Other famous features include the Mound of Hostages, which is aligned with both the Sun and the Moon. It is a large and complicated site, a vital part of Irish history.

What You Can Do To Help

The best course of action is to send two copies of a letter through the mail to the following addresses:

The Joint Committee on Environment and Local Government
Leinster House, KildareStreet
Secretary: Deputy Sean Haughey
Dublin 2, Ireland

And

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government
Dick Roche, Customs House
Dublin 1, Ireland

Vincent Salafia drafted a letter on the Save Tara/Skryne Valley Campaign (www.taraskryne.org) and I based this sample letter on it:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I object to the planned routing of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skryne valley.

I am a Pagan/Witch/Wiccan. Tara is a holy place for Pagans all over the world. You are in danger of harming one of the most spiritual places in Ireland. Putting a highway through the sacred precinct of Tara is like putting a highway through the Vatican, or Jerusalem.

I am in total agreement with the eminent Irish historians and archaeologists, who in letters to the Irish Independent and The Irish Examiner wrote: "The Hill of Tara constitutes the heart and Soul of Ireland. Its very name invokes the spirit and mystique of our people and is instantly recognisable worldwide. The plan approved recently by An Bord Pleanαla for the M3 motorway to dissect the Tara-Skryne valley, Ireland's premier national monument, spells out a massive national and international tragedy that must be averted." I believe the importance of the whole area to Ireland and her people, and the Irish diaspora throughout the world.

I look forward to your reply, and in the meantime urge you to reroute the M3 away from the Tara/Skryne Valley.

Save Tara!

Then sign the letter and give your address, including email address, under your signature and on the envelope. Then send it airmail, which costs 80 cents. The government is legally required to answer your letter.

It's good to elaborate your own feelings, and change the language of the sample letter offered here, but please be businesslike.

I am considering these letters as a love offering to the Goddess Brighid, and my organization is bringing printed letters for people to sign at our Imbolc celebration.

For an evocative and personal article about Tara by Liz Guerra, go to www.cwpn.org/savetara.html


“The question becomes, ‘What is Tara? Where are the boundaries of the ancient site?’” says Gavin Bone, prominent Pagan author and resident of Kells, on the M3 route. “The Roads Authority has defined the sacred precinct of Tara as the small area currently fenced off. But in truth the site is much larger: it sprawls across several hilltops, and includes the whole Skryne Valley.”

Thus, by more accurate definition, Tara is the entire complex of tombs, sacred landscape and monumental remains found in the Skryne Valley. This includes an adjacent hill crowned by a tall Christian church tower, Skreen Hill. The route for the M3 proposed by the Irish Road Authority will place a four-lane highway between Skreen Hill and the Hill of Tara. And they plan to build a 30-acre highway interchange within 1.5 kilometers of the High King of Ireland's Banqueting Hall atop Tara.

Adge, a Druid activist in Kells working to change the planned highway route, describes the effect on Tara: “The 30 acre interchange, which would be located 1000 yards north of the Hill of Tara, will be illuminated by high intensity lights on tall masts. There is also a redevelopment zone around the intersection, which will have a filling station, car dealerships, tire and exhaust repair shops, other shops and possibly some light industry. All of this will bring noise, light and air pollution within 1000 yards of Tara Hill.”

Everyone agrees that there is a clear need for a commuter route from Kells and Navan into Dublin, but proposing a highway route through the Hill of Tara archaeological complex has caused an international furor. The Irish road planners considered 10 different routes for the highway, weighing many different factors, not only archaeological issues, but also the road's impact on air and water, and on existing housing.

Local people in County Meath are very stressed out from their twice daily, hours-long commute to Dublin on a two-lane gridlocked road. Some local people support building the road as quickly as possible, no matter what route it takes. And some resent the international uproar over what they regard as a local planning decision.

And yet, people internationally are moved to protest Tara's plight. Liz Guerra, of the Connecticut Wiccan Pagan Network, says, “I truly love Tara. It's a place of peace and spirit. Its heart is alive with thousands of years of history just yearning to tell its stories. I worry that greed and corruption will silence her. I hope and pray that day never comes.”

Apparently, there is reason to worry about corruption. The Irish media and the governing political party are pursuing allegations of bribery and favoritism in a land sale involving the local Parliamentary candidate, who supports the current route of the M3. The land sale involves an offshore company registered in the South Pacific, a business partner with a history of bribing elected officials in rezoning cases, and 11 acres of County Meath under threat of development. There is now considerable doubt over whether the candidate will receive the necessary ratification to allow him to run in the election, according to The Irish Times.




Was there full transparency and fairness in the process by which the route for the M3 was chosen? Or were brown envelopes of money being passed among interested parties?

At minimum, the current route violates Ireland's laws to protect national monuments. Vincent Salafia, an Irish lawyer who has founded a group called Save Tara Skryne Valley, says, “Placing the M3 through the Skryne Valley so close to Tara is not only illegal, but unconstitutional. My legal team and I will not hesitate to file an injunction against the National Road Authority to stop construction of the M3 through Tara. Litigation could take years to complete, which will delay the completion of the motorway indefinitely. Realistically, completion of the motorway, under the current plan, cannot occur until at least 2015. It would be quicker to go back to the drawing board and take a route that does not harm Tara.”

According to the BBC, archaeologists will need to excavate 28 sites and monuments in the road's actual corridor. But that is just the beginning: they expect many more sites to be affected. There are 48 archaeological zones within 500 meters of the road corridor and about one site every 300 meters along the road itself.

All of these archaeological sites would need to be excavated before ground could be broken for that part of the M3. And since Ireland has signed the European Constitution, archaeological excavations must now be done to European standards, more exacting than local Irish archaeological regulations. Even if the protests and litigation don't succeed in holding up the route through Tara, archaeological requirements for the site will delay road construction for many years and add millions of Euros to the eventual cost of the road.

The protests against the M3 route through Tara include not only Pagans inspired by religious devotion, but also archaeologists, historians and other academics. In September 2004, seventeen university professors sent a letter to The Irish Times, deploring the placement of the M3 highway through “one of the richest and best-known archaeological landscapes in Europe” and going on to write: “We are not opponents of progress and development, but sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, it is necessary to question and reconsider major development decisions. The case of Tara is just such an exception. Are we in danger of repeating the same bitterly regretted mistakes we made at Stonehenge? In that instance, a major road has to be replaced by a tunnel, at enormous expense, in an attempt to ameliorate the irreversible damage inflicted on Britain's foremost archaeological monument and cultural landscape.”

For those of us who believe that the spirits of the land are sacred, living beings, the whole idea of a highway dividing an ancient sacred site is repugnant. Donna Darkwolf Vos, leader of Circle of the African Moon in Cape Town, South Africa, was shocked to hear about the situation at Tara. “I knew long before I made my own pilgrimage to Ireland that it is one of the most magickal parts of the world. It is magickal not so much for its leprechauns but for the land that spawned them. It is always a controversial struggle to find a balance between necessary progress whilst maintaining the links to our roots. In South Africa, our tribal lords, chiefs and clans ensure that the Ancestors and their land continue to be honored in a way that supports both progress and our roots in the past. There is no reason Ireland cannot do that also.”

The proposed M3 route through the sacred precinct at Tara threatens to alienate the very people most drawn to make a pilgrimage to the site for religious and ancestral reasons. As Byron Ballard, Pagan community leader in Asheville, NC, says, “I've traveled the road from the Boyne valley to Tara, driving carefully on the left and squinting for signposts. I have knelt in awe before the Mound of the Hostages and meditated with sheep grazing the windy hills. As an Irish-American, this is some of my own history, too. And as a Pagan, Tara is part of the sacred landscape that always draws me back to Ireland--as a pilgrim and as a tour & workshop leader. It is my hope that the planners and developers and elected officials will give heed to the landscape that calls so many of us in the Irish diaspora home.”


Caroline Kenner



More info here: http://www.taraskryne.org/

Sign this petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/hilltara/petition.html

[Timo]

Absolutely terrible. Sometimes I just wish the a disaster would happen and wipe industrized world and techology from this earth. It seems nothing is sacred anymore in this fast-food, mega-highway world. Sure pave over ancient sacred sites, they mean nothing, they're only the memory of your ancestors.... who cares!

[Marcus Marulus]

Tara - Temair

The Hill of Tara, known as Temair in gaeilge, was once the ancient seat of power in Ireland – 142 kings are said to have reigned there in prehistoric and historic times. In ancient Irish religion and

mythology

Temair was the sacred place of dwelling for the gods, and was the entrance to the otherworld. Saint Patrick is said to have come to Tara to confront the ancient religion of the pagans at its most powerful site.

One interpretation of the name Tara says that it means a "place of great prospect" and indeed on a clear day it is claimed that features in half the counties of Ireland can be seen from atop Tara. In the distance to the northwest can be seen the brilliant white quartz front of Newgrange and further north lies the Hill of Slane, where according to legend St. Patrick lit his Pascal fire prior to his visit to Tara in 433 AD.

Early in the 20th century a group of Israelites came to Tara with the conviction that the Arc of the Covenant was buried in on the famous hill. They dug the Mound of the Synods in search of the Arc but found only some Roman coins. Official excavation in the 1950s revealed circles of post holes, indicating the construction of substantial buildings here. A new theory suggests Tara was the ancient capital of the lost kingdom of Atlantis. The mythical land of Atlantis was Ireland, according to a new book.

There are a large number of monuments and earthen structures on the Hill of Tara. The earliest settlement at the site was in the Neolithic, and the Mound of the Hostages was constructed in or around 2500BC. There are over thirty monuments which are visible, and probably as many again which have no visible remains on the surface but which have been detected using special non-intrusive archaeological techniques and aerial photography. A huge temple measuring 170 metres and made of over 300 wooden posts, was discovered recently at Tara. Only two monuments at Tara have been excavated - The Mound of the Hostages in the 1950s, and the Rath of the Synods at the turn of the 19th-20th Centuries. Click here to see a comprehensive map of the monuments on Tara. Click here for the Tara photo gallery.

Map of Tara
The Stone of Destiny

Sitting on top of the King's Seat (Forradh) of Temair is the most famous of Tara's monuments - Ireland's ancient coronation stone - the Lia Fail or "Stone of Destiny", which was brought here according to mythology by the godlike people, the Tuatha Dé Danann, as one of their sacred objects. It was said to roar when touched by the rightful king of Tara.

WHICH STONE?
Formerly located just north of the Mound of the Hostages (see map), it was moved to its current site after the Battle of Tara during the Irish revolution of 1798 to mark the graves of 400 rebels who died here. Some say the true Stone of Destiny was formerly the Pillow of Jacob from the Old Testament. They also claim it was flat and that it was moved from Tara by King Fergus of Scotland and was named the Stone of Scone which then became the coronation stone of British kings at Westminster Cathedral. Many historians accept that the present granite pillar at Tara is the true Stone of Destiny, but a number of people have argued that the Stone of Scone is in fact the real thing. One legend states that it was only one of four stones positioned at the cardinal directions on Tara - and it is interesting to note that the Hall of Tara, the ancient political centre of Ireland, is aligned North-South.
The following verse is from the Dindshenchas story about how Tara got its name:
Cathair Crofhind ('twas not amiss), was its name under the Tuatha De Danand, till there came Tea, never unjust, the wife of Erimon lofty of mien.
Round her house was built a rampart, by Tea daughter of Lugaid;
she was buried beyond the wall without, so that from her is Temair named.
The Seat of the Kings was its name: the kingly line of the Milesians reigned in it: five names accordingly were given it from the time when it was Fordruim till it was Temair.Read the rest here.

Download your FREE Tara wallpaper (pictured above) which contains the verses on left.

The Mound of the Hostages

The "Mound of the Hostages" is a megalithic 'passage tomb' and is the oldest monument on the hill of Tara, dating to about 2,500BC. The name "Mound of the Hostages" derives from the custom of overkings like those at Tara retaining important personages from subject kingdoms to ensure their submission.
One of the legendary kings of Tara was named Niall of the Nine Hostages in recognition of the fact that he held hostages from all the provinces of Ireland and from Britain.

The passage at the Mound of the Hostages is short, and is aligned on the cross-quarter days of November 8 and February 4, the ancient Celtic festivals of Samhain and Imbolc. Just inside the entrance on the left is a large decorated orthostat.

This picture shows the short passage at the Mound of the Hostages at Tara. As a solar construct it is not as accurate as other passages, which are notably longer, but according to Brennan (The Stones of Time, 1994) the daily changes in the position of a 13-foot long sunbeam are more than adequate to determine specific dates. The passage would, without any doubt, also capture the light of the Full Moon at certain times in the 19-year cycle, specifically the minor standstill rising position.

Ancient Standing Stones

In the churchyard at Tara there are two standing stones, which are believed to be ancient – remnants of a time when there were many stone monuments on Tara. The taller of the two stones is thought to feature a figure of the Celtic fertility god Cernunnos, and is similar to many of the 'Sheela na Gig' representations found across Ireland. These stones may date to the Neolithic period, although are more likely to have their origin in the Bronze Age.
In the early histories it was noted that on this section of the hill there once stood a monument called "The Cross of Adamnan" commemorating a seventh century saint who called a church synod at Tara to enact laws that gave greater rights to women.

The ancient documents about Tara named many standing stones on this section of the hill – Dall, Dorcha, Maol, Bloc and Bluicna.

The Standing Stones of Tara also recall the legend that candidates for the High Kingship of Tara had to drive their chariots toward two sacred stones standing closely together. They remained closed for the non-accepted candidate and opened a path only for the rightful king.

The above photo shows the great 'Banqueting Hall' at the Hill of Tara. Click here to see great aerial pictures of the Hill of Tara. Mythical Ireland has also reproduced the ancient tale about how Tara got its name, from the old collection of placename stories in the Dindshenchas - click here to read this tale.

Threat to the Hill of Tara

The Hill of Tara is under threat from the construction of a new motorway, the M3, which is currently being built and will disect the tranquil Tara-Skryne valley and pose a threat to many monuments which will doubtlessly be uncovered during its construction. Already a unique hengiform site has been revealed at Lismullen, and this has stopped work on the motorway. Read up-to-date news about the whole M3 saga on out "Sites Under Threat" forum.

Read what the experts said about the M3 here. Support for this expert group has come from a number of sources, not least the South African born Oscar-winning actress, Charlize Theron.

SOURCES:

'Tara', The Discovery Programme, Government Publications 1995.
Ordnance Survey Letters Meath, John O'Donovan, 2001.
The Tara Walk, Michael Slavin, 2000.
The Book of Tara, Michael Slavin, 1996, Wolfhound Press.
Martin Brennan, The Stones of Time, 1994, Inner Traditions.
The Legend of Tara, Elizabeth Hickey, 1988.

Web pages of interest:

Discovery Programme - new information on Tara.
New monument discovered under Hill of Tara.
Tara information from the Stone Pages.

[source]

[Almost a Christian]

All about to be bulldozed by that ghastly crew in Leinster House. Let it not be said that the junta here doesn't have a certain instinct for a bit of black humour. The government itself meticulously set up plans for this rampage. Post election, they put in a wet little Green to do the dirty work! The poor little wretch (by the name of Gormley) looks like a rabbit stuck in headlights. But there is nothing that spineless twerp can do. And even the noisy stink kicked up by Brussels will hardly even delay those looming bulldozers..amazing how a backbone can suddenly be generated when there's a few quid a stake?

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Almost a Christian

All about to be bulldozed by that ghastly crew in Leinster House. Let it not be said that the junta here doesn't have a certain instinct for a bit of black humour. The government itself meticulously set up plans for this rampage. Post election, they put in a wet little Green to do the dirty work! The poor little wretch (by the name of Gormley) looks like a rabbit stuck in headlights. But there is nothing that spineless twerp can do. And even the noisy stink kicked up by Brussels will hardly even delay those looming bulldozers..amazing how a backbone can suddenly be generated when there's a few quid a stake?

Bulldozed? Why? They want to build something there?

[Almost a Christian]

New autobahn.

TaraWatch

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Almost a Christian

New autobahn.

TaraWatch

That is a savagery, it should be stopped.