This hillock was bare then, when a holy man lit a huge fire to mark the Resurrection. The fire brought the Druid high king of Ireland from his palace in Tara. He was enraged, but then the priest converted him to Christianity.
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And so, the legend goes, the “fire” of the new religion spread throughout Ireland and the island on the western edge of “civilization” became “the land of saints and scholars,” the one spot of enlightenment in the Europe of the Dark Ages.
The holy man was St. Patrick, who had brought the Christian message to Ireland the previous year and whose death March 17, 461, is celebrated around the world next March 17.
Tara and the Hill of Slane are just two stops on a tour of the Boyne Valley, about 50 km north of Dublin, an area renowned as Ireland’s Valley of the Kings. There are royal monuments here that pre-date Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt.
The high kings of Ireland — who claimed supremacy over all the provincial kings — held court on Tara for centuries and the hill has an almost mystic grip on the Irish psyche (right down to the name of the Irish-owned plantation in Gone With The Wind.
Nothing remains of this Irish Camelot today but some burial mounds and the so-called Stone of Destiny on which, legend has it, the high kings were crowned. But a video in the visitor centre and guided walks put the story in context.
Tara is ancient but much, much older are the Neolithic royal burial mounds known as Bru na Boinne (palace of the Boyne), the most impressive Stone age tombs in Europe, which have been carbon-dated to about 3000 BC. The best known is Newgrange, which has been partially excavated and visitors can go inside the burial chambers after taking a shuttle from the marvellously informative visitor centre.
But it’s not just ancient Celtic and Neolithic monarchs who have a place in the story of Ireland’s Valley of the Kings. The memory of two much later kings — William of Orange of the Netherlands and James II of England — are enshrined here, too.
The Protestant William had been asked to take the English throne after the Catholic James was deposed, and their armies met here. The repercussions of William’s victory in the Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690 — July 12 on modern calendars — reverberate throughout Northern Ireland to this day with triumphal Protestant marches on “the Glorious Twelfth.”
You can walk the battlefield and re-live the battle through artifacts, a diorama and a video at the new visitor centre, and watch gunners in period dress give musket-firing demonstrations.
For further information, visit the website heritageireland.ie and click on “Midlands and east coast.” Bus tours of the Boyne Valley run regularly from Dublin. Tourist information on Ireland is available from discoverireland.com.
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