by Pauline Bleach

Created on: April 25, 2008

We tumble out of the car and in through the narrow gate on to the Hill of Tara. Behind us just across the road that leads here safely in the ground is an huge 300 stake 5000 year old Oak temple that surrounds the Hill.

We abandon the path for the long grass, traipsing across our history. The Hill is the central complex of our ancient civilization. 7000 years of history, 3000 Years of Brehon law, a complex legal system that covered every area of Irish life until the 17th century, the landscape tells yet hides so much underneath it's green rolling vista of mounds and fortifications.

We reach the Central mound Teach Cormac and the Lia Fail [Stone of Destiny].
Legend says it calls out when touched by the High King of Ireland. It amuses me that every Irish person who has been to Tara from Ollamh Foldha (High King, Founder of Brehon Law 1318 1358 BC), the O'Carolan (Harpist 1670-1738), W.B. Yeats (Poet 1865-1939 ) to James Joyce (Writer 1882-1941) has touched it just to see.

From Teac Cormac, we look across the valley to Hill of Skryne. Once this was filled with the residences of the four provincial Kings of Ireland, Brehon Law Schools, Medical Schools and Amphitheaters/Temples like the 2,500 year old one found at Lismullen in the path of the M3 motorway.

Down in the valley, the bulldozers are severing the plain for the new M3 motorway and with it my dreams that one day the fragments of our history would become a completed picture.
On the Hill another initiation, my friend introduces her young child to the mound of the hostages. That's where Finn fought the wicked Fairy Aileen, her young eyes pop out of her head. In Tara our culture lives.

I wonder once again what the valley would have looked for the greatest of Daniel O'Connell's monster marches. Estimates of over a million Irish people converged on Tara and shook the British Empire by peacefully, determinedly and with great dignity asking for Irish Home Rule.

"Tara is surrounded by historical reminiscences which give it an importance worthy of being considered by everyone who approaches it for political purposes and an elevation in the public mind which no other part of Ireland possesses," O'Connell proclaimed that day.

That was 1843.

Two years later, the Famine started.

Four years later, many of those who attended would be dead or emigrated.

The flame lit that day in the Tara valley the only legacy of their desperate lives.
Fire has a huge part to play in the myths of Tara from St Patrick's fire on the Hill of Slane around

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