Hill of Tara

The hill is a letdown for about ninety seconds. It rises barely sixty metres out of rolling Meath farmland, and most of what matters on it is not built up but scooped out, shallow ditches and low banks under a skin of cropped turf, so a visitor can walk across three monuments without registering any of them. Then the ground falls away on every side and a great sweep of the midlands opens out, hedgerow after hedgerow going grey with distance, and the point of the place arrives all at once. Tara was never chosen for height. It was chosen for reach.

The name has been fought over for a thousand years. Medieval Irish knew the site as Temair, modern Irish as Teamhair, and the Dindshenchas, the great body of medieval place-lore, offers a tidy answer to where that came from: Temair is Tea-múr, the rampart of Tea, daughter of Lugaid son of Ith and wife of Érimón son of Míl, the first woman of the Milesians to go into a cold grave. A rampart was raised around her house, the poem says, and she was buried outside the wall, and the hill took her name. The toponymist Dónall Mac Giolla Easpaig calls this explanation absolutely far-fetched and without any linguistic basis, and notes that a compound of that shape is wholly improbable in Irish place names. One medieval commentator had already smelled a rat and proposed instead that Temair simply meant a height with a view. That is scarcely better. Mac Giolla Easpaig’s own answer is more interesting than either: Temair descends from an Indo-European root meaning to cut, the same root behind Irish taman for a tree trunk and tamhnach for a clearing, and it is kin to Greek temenos and Latin templum. The word means ground cut off from ordinary use. It is a sanctuary, and more than twenty other places in Ireland carry the name, most of them with religious associations of their own.

The archaeology agrees with the etymology and ignores the kings entirely. The oldest visible thing on the hill is Dumha na nGiall, the Mound of the Hostages, a passage tomb raised around 3000 BC whose short passage is lined with stones cut with spirals, cup marks and zigzags. It received burials for more than fifteen centuries. When Ráith na Ríg, the Fort of the Kings, was thrown around the summit about 100 BC, its builders bent the line of their enclosure so that the ancient mound would fall inside it. They did not know whose bones those were either. They simply refused to leave them out.

Under the turf a few paces north, the Rath of the Synods produced something stranger. Seán P. Ó Ríordáin dug it over two summers in the early 1950s, and the report Eoin Grogan finally published in 2008 lays out four phases of ritual, funerary and domestic use. The late Iron Age enclosures there closely echo the ceremonial sites at Emain Macha and Dún Ailinne. Then, in the second to fourth centuries AD, somebody was depositing Roman glass and pottery at the centre of the site, and the assemblage is not the ordinary spread of a provincial Roman household. It is specialised. It is drinking vessels. Rome never governed a foot of Ireland, and here on the hill of the high kings someone was doing something formal with imported cups.

The famous story about Tara is a story about a fire, and it comes from Muirchú, writing his life of Patrick in the seventh century when the hill was already a ruin. Muirchú calls Temoria the barbarians’ Babylon. King Loíguire’s law was that whoever kindled a fire before the king’s on that one night should have his soul cut off from among his people, and Patrick kindled a paschal fire that almost everyone in the plain could see. The druids told the king that if it were not quenched that night it would never be quenched, and would overcome all the fires of their religion, and draw away every kingdom to itself. Loíguire, troubled like Herod, had nine chariots yoked and went out with the faces of his men and his horses turned to the left, because that was the fitting way to travel toward such a thing. They came back to Temoria sad, cowed and humiliated. The next day Patrick walked into the banqueting hall with five men behind him and the doors shut, and nobody stood up.

There is no evidence the fire was ever lit at Slane. Muirchú puts it at the Graves of the Men of Fecc.

What the place granted was legitimacy, and the instrument was a stone. Cinaed ua hArtacáin, who died in 975, wrote that he was standing on it: the stone under my two feet, from which Inis Fáil is named. Cuán ua Lothcháin, dead in 1024, recorded its position precisely, and a prose note beside his poem says the Fál lay beside the Mound of the Hostages on the north, the stone that roared under the feet of each king who took possession of the throne of Ireland. A tall pillar now stands on the Forradh mound and is universally called the Lia Fáil. George Petrie believed it was the original, moved. P. W. Joyce, who had talked fifty years earlier with one of the men who did the moving, said it was hauled up in 1821 not from the Mound of the Hostages but out of the trench around the Forradh, where it had lain flat for generations, and set upright to mark the grave of rebels killed on the hill in 1798. Joyce added a practical objection worth keeping. Inauguration stones in Ireland and Scotland were small and portable, the Stone of Scone being a slab of twenty-five inches by fifteen; the pillar on the Forradh is twelve feet long, nearly two feet through, and weighs well over a ton. No legend, he wrote, is wild enough to have the Tuatha Dé Danann carrying that across the sea in hide boats. His conclusion was that the real Lia Fáil is still on the hill, in the ground, unfound.

The limits of the place are its own history. Tara stopped being a royal residence in the sixth century and decayed from there, and the closing stanza of its own great Dindshenchas poem says so without much affection: the faith of Christ has brought all strength to nought, and he gave not protection to Temair. Its political importance was gone by about the eleventh century. What survived was the symbol, which proved sturdier and considerably more dangerous. Between 1899 and 1902 members of the British-Israel Association of London dug up the Rath of the Synods in the belief that the Ark of the Covenant was buried under it, a conviction that ran on a nineteenth-century invention: a princess called Tea Tephi, brought from Jerusalem, welded onto the Tea of the medieval poems, who appears in no Irish source before that century. William Butler Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Maud Gonne, Arthur Griffith and George Moore came to protest, lit a bonfire and sang, and were ordered off the hill by a man with a rifle. The excavators left in 1902 with nothing. The campaign against them was, as Mairéad Carew’s account of the affair puts it, the first media campaign to save an Irish national monument, and it would not be the last: a century later the hill was fighting a motorway, and the Celticist Bart Jaski closed a review of the standard scholarly volume on Tara by remarking that scholars might not be able to save it from its bypass, but could at least try to free it from the other shadows still hanging over it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Hill of Tara?

The Hill of Tara is a low ridge in County Meath, Ireland, about thirty kilometres north-west of Dublin, covered with prehistoric and early medieval earthworks. In medieval Irish tradition it was the seat of the kingship of Tara, and whoever held it was regarded, symbolically at least, as king of the whole island. Its Irish name is Teamhair, medieval Temair.

What does the name Tara actually mean?

The medieval Dindshenchas explains Temair as Tea-múr, the burial mound of a woman called Tea, but modern toponymists reject that as linguistically baseless. The placename scholar Dónall Mac Giolla Easpaig derives Temair instead from an Indo-European root meaning to cut, making it a piece of ground cut off from ordinary use, a sanctuary, and kin to Greek temenos and Latin templum. More than twenty other Irish places carry the same name.

Is the standing stone at Tara really the Lia Fáil?

Medieval writers who visited the ruined hill place the Lia Fáil beside the Mound of the Hostages on its north side, not on the Forradh where the pillar stands today. P. W. Joyce recorded that the present stone was raised in 1821 from a trench around the Forradh to mark the grave of rebels killed in 1798, and argued that at twelve feet long and over a ton it is far too large to be an inauguration stone. He concluded that the real Lia Fáil is still buried somewhere on the hill.

What happened between Saint Patrick and the king at Tara?

According to Muirchú’s seventh-century life of Patrick, King Loíguire held that anyone lighting a fire before the king’s on that night should be cut off from his people, and Patrick lit a paschal fire visible across the plain. The king’s druids warned that if it were not quenched at once it would never be quenched and would overcome their own religion. Loíguire rode out with nine chariots and returned to Tara humiliated, and Patrick entered the banqueting hall the next day with five companions.

Why did people dig up Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant?

Between 1899 and 1902 the British-Israel Association of London excavated the Rath of the Synods believing the Ark lay beneath it. The belief rested on a nineteenth-century story about a Jerusalem princess named Tea Tephi who was grafted onto the Tea of the medieval poems and appears in no Irish source before then. Yeats, Douglas Hyde and Maud Gonne protested on the hill, and the excavators left empty-handed.

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