The Hill of Tara ( or ) is a hill and ancient ceremonial and burial site near Skryne in County Meath, Ireland. Tradition identifies the hill as the inauguration place and seat of the High Kings of Ireland; it also appears in Irish mythology. Tara consists of numerous monuments and earthworks—dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Age—including a passage tomb (the "Mound of the Hostages"), burial mounds, round enclosures, a standing stone (believed to be the Lia Fáil or "Stone of Destiny"), and a ceremonial avenue. There is also a church and graveyard on the hill. Tara forms part of a larger ancient landscape and Tara itself is a protected national monument under the care of the Office of Public Works, an agency of the Irish Government.
Name
The name Tara is an anglicization of the Irish name or ('hill of Tara'). It is also known as ('Tara of the kings'), and formerly also ('the grey ridge'). The Old Irish form is . It is believed this comes from Proto-Celtic and means a 'sanctuary' or 'sacred space' cut off for ceremony, cognate with the Greek () and Latin . Another suggestion is that it means "a height with a view".
Ancient monuments
thumb|left|Layout of the Hill of Tara
The remains of twenty ancient monuments are visible, and at least three times that many have been found through geophysical surveys and aerial photography.
The oldest visible monument is (the 'Mound of the Hostages'), a Neolithic passage tomb built around 3,200 BC. It holds the remains of hundreds of people, most of which are cremated bones. In the Neolithic, it was the communal tomb of a single community for about a century, during which there were almost 300 burials. Almost a millennium later, in the Bronze Age, there were a further 33 burials – first in the passage and then in the mound around it.
During the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, a huge double timber circle or "wood henge" was built on the hilltop. It was 250m in diameter and surrounded the Mound of the Hostages.
There are several large round enclosures on the hill, which were built in the Iron Age. It was occupied between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, and Roman artefacts were also found there. The passage is shorter than monuments like Newgrange, making it less precise in providing alignments with the Sun, but Martin Brennan writes in The Stones of Time that "daily changes in the position of a 13-foot long sunbeam are more than adequate to determine specific dates". Early Irish literature records that a royal gathering called the 'feast of Tara' (feis Temro) was held there at Samhain. Historian Dáibhí Ó Cróinín writes that Tara "possessed an aura that seemed to set it above" the other royal seats. It is recorded as the seat of the High King of Ireland (Ard Rí) and is "central to most of the great drama in early Irish literature".
Irish legend says that the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny) at Tara was brought to Ireland by the divine Tuatha Dé Danann, and that it would cry out under the foot of the true king.
Tara was probably controlled by the Érainn before it was seized by the Laigin in the third century.
The Irish annals record the Battle of Tara in 980 between the Gaelic Irish of Meath, led by Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill, and the Norse Vikings of Dublin, led by Amlaíb Cuarán.
The Five Roads of Tara
According to legend, five ancient roads or meet at Tara, linking it with all the provinces of Ireland. The earliest reference to the five roads of Tara was in the tale (The Destruction of Da Derga's Hall).
The five roads are said to be:
- , which went west towards Lough Owel, then to Rathcroghan.
- , which went to Slane, then to Navan Fort, ending at Dunseverick.
- , which went through Dublin and through the old district of Cualann towards Waterford.
- , which went towards and through Ossory.
- ('Great Highway'), which roughly followed the Esker Riada to County Galway.
Later history
thumb|right|The Stone of Destiny and Mound of the Hostages
During the rebellion of 1798, United Irishmen formed a camp on the hill but were attacked and defeated by British troops on 26 May 1798 and the was allegedly moved to commemorate the 400 rebels who died on the hill that day.
In 1843, the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell hosted a peaceful political demonstration at Tara in favour of Irish self-governance which drew over 750,000 people, highlighting the lasting significance of Tara.
British Prime Minister John Russell inherited the Tara estate during the 19th century. At the turn of the 20th century, Tara was vandalised by British Israelists who thought that the British were part of the Lost Tribes of Israel and that the hill contained the Ark of the Covenant. A group of British Israelists, led by retired Anglo-Indian judge Edward Wheeler Bird, set about excavating the site having paid off the landowner, Gustavus Villiers Briscoe. Irish cultural nationalists held a mass protest over the destruction of the national heritage site, including Douglas Hyde, Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, George Moore and W. B. Yeats. Hyde tried to interrupt the dig but was ordered away by a man wielding a rifle. Maud Gonne made a more flamboyant protest by relighting an old bonfire that Briscoe had lit to celebrate the coronation of Edward VII. She began to sing Thomas Davis's song "A Nation Once Again" by the fire, much to the consternation of the landlord and the police.
The Irish government bought the southern part of the hill in 1952, and the northern part in 1972.
The religious order Missionary Society of St. Columban had its international headquarters at Dalgan Park, just north of the Hill of Tara. The order was named after the Saint who was born in the Ancient Kingdom of Meath. The land Dalgan Park lies on was once owned by the kings of Tara. The seminary is also situated on the path of the , one of the five ancient roads that meet at Tara.
Church
thumb|St Patrick's Church, now a visitor centre
A church, called Saint Patrick's, is on the eastern side of the hilltop. The "Rath of the Synods" has been partly destroyed by its churchyard. The modern church was built in 1822–23 on the site of an earlier one.
The earliest evidence of a church at Tara is a charter dating from the 1190s. In 1212, this church was "among the possessions confirmed to the Knights Hospitallers of Saint John of Kilmainham by Pope Innocent III". The distance between the motorway and the hill is – it intersects the old N3 at the Blundelstown interchange between the Hill of Tara and the Hill of Skryne. Protesters said that an alternative route about west of Tara would have been straighter, cheaper and less destructive.
On Sunday 23 September 2007 over 1500 people met on the Hill of Tara to take part in a human sculpture representing a harp and spelling out the words "SAVE TARA VALLEY" as a call for the re-routing of the M3 motorway away from Tara. Actors Stuart Townsend and Jonathan Rhys Meyers attended this event. There was also a letter writing campaign to preserve the Hill of Tara.
The Hill of Tara was included in the World Monuments Fund's 2008 Watch List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites in the world. The following year it was included in a list of the 15 must-see endangered cultural treasures by the Smithsonian Institution.
The motorway project proceeded, and the road was opened in June 2010.