A Hill to Die On - Frank McNally on celebrating the summer solstice at Tara

Irish Times

2 days ago

Even the great archaeologist George Eogan thought the monuments at Tara could be an 'anti-climax', although to people like him, they were 'quietly spectacular'.
Visiting the hill for the solstice last weekend, I was reminded of what he meant by the first part, at least. Viewed from ground level, the Mound of the Hostages, King's Seat, and Cormac's House are not much to look at: just a series of grassy bumps and hollows.
But their great antiquity exercises a magnetic pull, clearly, even on non-specialists. Hence the large crowd of new agers, old agers, and agers in between who gathered on the hill to witness the sun go down on the longest day of the year.
Some had been there since dawn, or earlier. Beside a Meath County Council sign saying 'No Camping, by order', there were a dozen tents of various sizes. In front of one, a trio of musicians played traditional tunes. Up at the king's seat, meanwhile, a woman chanted religious songs in a language that may have been Sanskrit.
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Most people, however, were just sitting quietly, on the bumps or on various parts of the west-facing side of the slope.
It was not a vintage sunset, thanks in part to a bank of low cloud on the horizon. And the relative lack of spectacle, combined with the undramatic nature of the monuments, added a strangeness to the sight of so many people sitting on a hill, gazing west.
They looked like the wind-watchers of whom a character in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman reminisces:
'People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are interweaved like ribbons at a wedding.'
A round of applause rippled around the place at one point. It wasn't clear if it this was for the sun, or for the woman chanting. Maybe it was for a trick performed by one of the many dogs people had brought with them.
While admiring the Mound of the Hostages earlier, I had stepped in a more recent mound of something, left by one of the four-legged visitors. 'I can tell you which one it was,' a sun-watcher who witnessed my misfortune said, offering tissues: 'His owner made a big show of looking for a plastic bag but he was only letting on.'
Then the sun, although still 10 degrees above the horizon, sank fully behind the cloud, breaking the spell. It was like Meath going 10 points down with five minutes left in a football match. Suddenly, the locals were all heading for the exit, to beat the traffic.
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Somewhere among the babble of conversations at Tara on Saturday, the phrase 'prophesies of Jeremiah' floated towards me on the breeze.
I had to look it up later to remind myself that Jeremiah was a Hebrew prophet of c.600 BC, who was indirectly responsible for one of the madder episodes in Tara's history. That was in 1899, when a bunch of eccentrics called the British Israelites started digging the hill up in search of the Ark of the Covenant.
Among other things, Jeremiah foretold the Jews' Babylonian captivity, while also prophesying the rise of a New Jerusalem in a place unknown. For the British Israelites, or some of them, that place was Meath. It was even argued that the prophet had founded it himself, after relocating to Ireland and becoming high king.
The funny thing is, the freelance excavators of Tara were Anglo-Saxon unionists and imperialists.
It might have been preferable for them to find the Ark in England. But Tara had the right mix of history, myth, and monuments. Securing permission only from the landlord, they dug up a site known as the Rath of the Synods, over howls of protest from nationalists and conservation groups.
Arthur Griffith and WB Yeats were among those who campaigned against the vandalism, until ordered off the land by a man with a rifle. Maud Gonne lit a bonfire the landlord had meant for the coronation of a new king, and sang A Nation Once Again around it, to his chagrin. Eventually, as criticism mounted, the diggers gave up in 1902.
By a happy coincidence, Tara is the subject of an essay in the latest issue of Irish Heritage Studies, the annual research journal of the Office of Public Works, which landed in my postbox recently. The main subject is archaeologist R A S Macallister (1870 – 1950), who pioneered the proper study of the site in his decades as UCD professor of Celtic archaeology.
A young Macallister was among the critics of the 1899 escapade, which he called a 'national calamity'. His work led eventually to a government and Maud Gonne-approved excavation of the Mound of the Hostages in the 1950s. That got the British Israelites excited again. But although the studies added to the bank of knowledge about Tara's ancient history, there was still no sign of an Ark.