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TARA |
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TARA , the home of the High Kings of Ireland and source of so many
of the great tales, looks nowadays like nothing so much as a neatly kept
nine-hole golf course: a gently undulating swath of green marked out by
archeological plaques. Imagining the palace, whose wood-and-wattle
structures have entirely disappeared, leaving only scars in the earth,
isn't easy. But it's an effort worth making, for this was a great royal
residence, already thriving before the Trojan Wars and still flourishing
as late as the tenth century AD. The origins of the site are lost in
prehistory, but it originally probably had a religious significance,
gradually growing from the base of a local priest-king to become the
seat of the High Kings. Its heyday came in the years following the reign
of the legendary Cormac Mac Art in the third century AD - when five
great highways converged here: this was a ritual, rather than a
residential, centre - and by the time of the confrontation of St Patrick
with King Laoghaire in the fifth century, its power was already
declining. The title of High King was not, on the whole, a hereditary
one: rather the kings were chosen, or won power, on the battlefield. So
they were not necessarily local, or even permanently based here, but all
evoked the spirit of Tara as the basis of their power.
In later history, there was a minor battle at the site during the 1798
Rebellion, and in 1843 Daniel O'Connell held a mass "Monster" meeting -
said to have attracted as many as a million people (a quarter of
Ireland's population today) - as part of his campaign against union with
Britain.
You'll find the site signposted just off the N3. From the car park it
appears as a wild meadow on a table-top hill, no more than 300ft above
the surrounding countryside; just beside the car park is the Banquet
Hall Café , (daily 9.30am-6pm). There is a plan near the entrance, which
will help you to identify the various mounds. The path to the site leads
through the yard of the old Church of Ireland, which is now used as a
visitor centre (May to mid-June 9.30am-5pm; mid-June to mid-Sept
9.30am-6.30pm; mid-Sept to Oct 10am-5pm; £1.50/¬1.90), with a romantic
but reasonably sophisticated audio-visual show that gives some
background to Tara's history and also, more valuably, shows a number of
aerial views that do a lot to make sense of the design. The church
itself, dating from 1822, is a modest grey building typical of the
Anglican churches found all over Ireland; somehow it seems fitting that
it should find a role participating in the re-enhancement of a more
ancient landscape that its builders once attempted to dominate. The
church's only remarkable feature is a bright stained-glass window by the
well-known Dublin artist Evie Hone, which was installed in 1935 to
commemorate the 1500th anniversary of the visit of St Patrick to the
site and thus the coming of Christianity to Ireland. St Patrick
challenged the then High King at Tara, Laoghaire, by lighting his
paschal (Easter) flame on the nearby Hill of Slane in defiance of the
holy fire at Tara - thereby demonstrating the ritual sympathies of the
new religion with the old. Once you are on top of what is actually very
rich pasture, the power of the setting immediately becomes clear, with
endless views that take in whole counties, their patchwork fields and a
huge sky.
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