Tara, the Boyne, and Skerries- Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Dublin is a city.  It's crowded and busy and bustling.  We thought about it, and decided we didn't really want to do that again today.  We still had the car, so we decided to find some things to do out in the countryside.

Our first stop, after McDonald's breakfast, was the Hill of Tara in County Meath.  This place is the spiritual centre of Irish history.  It is the place where the ancient Irish kings would be crowned, and the place that held the power in ancient Ireland.  After parking the car and visiting the gift shops there, we walked up to the stone church that acts as the visitor's center.  We passed the statue of St. Patrick on the way, and were reminded how he had to convert the Irish kings here before he was able to bring Christianity to the rest of Ireland.  In the church, which seemed to be an active parish church too, we watched a movie about the history and archeology of Tara.  Unfortunately, it said how it was made up of several prehistoric tombs, plus we had to go through the church's Christian cemetery to get there, so from that point on Emma was freaked out.    

The Hill of Tara doesn't seem like much of a hill.  Walking to it is like walking up a gently sloping field.  Once there, the earthen works seem higher than the hill itself.  But the rest of the land around it is so low that it it possible to see for miles in many directions from there.  We first found the "Mound of the Hostages," which is a Stone Age "passage tomb" and probably the oldest part of Tara.  We probably able to get a little closer to it than many because they were trimming the thick growth from the top of it with weed whackers, and the fence surrounding it was open.  Signs also told of how much it had changed shape because of the archeological excavation that had been done on it in the 1950s.  The next obvious stop was the Lia Fáil, otherwise known as the Coronation Stone or the Stone of Destiny which was used in the coronation ceremonies of the ancient High Kings.  There was also a marker for the United Irishmen who lost there lives in the "Battle of Tara" in 1798.  Both of these stones meant that Emma wouldn't go near that hill, but she and Julie looked on as Anna and Scott took pictures and examined them closer.

After Tara, we drove eastwards and found ourselves at the visitors' center for the Battle of the Boyne.  It was not a stop we had planned today, but when Scott saw how close we'd be to it, he asked us to stop.  The 1690 battle is the largest battle ever to be fought in Britain or Ireland, in terms of the number of soldiers involved.  It was fought between forces supporting William of Orange as the English king (which included forces from many allied countries in Europe as well as Ulster Protestants) and Jacobite forces supporting James II who had been deposed (whose forces included many from Louis XIV's France).   There were about 60,000 soldiers involved total.

The center is in a Georgian style building.  The girls had scavenger hunts to complete as we looked through the exhibits.  The battle map had lasers drawing the battlelines of the two sides, and was quite effective.  A short movie is also shown about the battle, which is easier to follow having seen the battle map.  The way that the battle unfolded is pretty well explained, but for all that, there is very little about Ireland's role in this particular battle.  For example, we couldn't explain why the fight for England's throne was taking place in Ireland in the first place.  The consequences of the battle had "ramifications that are still felt today" in Ireland, according to the movie, but the visitor's center itself was very light on what those ramifications were.  The visitors' center is not old, having been opened in 2008, and it seems that the governments of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were involved.   Certainly, this battle is an event that looms very largely but very differently in the points of views of the two sides today.

We ate a late lunch at the Battle of the Boyne's "tea room," and then took a short walk along the battlefield.  Not much is left from 1690.  A series of small "houses," which consist of only framework and roofs, have been recently constructed to represent the village of Oldbridge, which was an important feature of the battlefield.  We went as far as the Schomberg stone, marking where Marshall Schomberg, one of William's generals, was killed by French cavalry.  As we drove away from the battlefield, we're pretty sure we crossed briefly into County Louth before crossing the River Boyne back into County Meath.

Our next stop was the coastal town of Skerries, on the Irish Sea.  Going to the beach might not have seemed like a great idea, given the cool overcast day that we had today, but it gave the girls a chance to have some fun.  Julie picked out Skerries as a destination because she saw that large colonies of grey seals live there.  We didn't see any seals, but they were probably at the islands that we could see from the shore.  While we were at the beach a dark, ominous cloud passed overhead, just where we were.  It wasn't enough to keep Anna from going into the water and getting down into the water up to her neck.  Emma was in her suit too, looking for shells.  

We had Subway for dinner, near our hotel, and then took our car back.  Julie has driven on the left side of the road for the last time, at least for a while, and we're left to depend on busses and public transportation until we leave on Friday.