Post by jadedsage on Nov 14, 2004 21:24:55 GMT -5
Archaeologists say 'heart and soul of Ireland' is threatened
Angelique Chrisafis, Ireland correspondent
Thursday November 11, 2004
The Guardian
It is Ireland's most sacred stretch of earth and one of the most important ancient landscapes in Europe. The Hill of Tara, with its passage tomb, earthworks and prehistorical burial mounds, is the mythical and ceremonial capital of Ireland, dating back 4,000 years.
But now the landscape in county Meath, north-west of Dublin, is the subject of a campaign to save it from what one archaeologist has called the "worst case of state-sponsored vandalism ever inflicted on Irish cultural heritage".
More than 50 senior academics have joined a protest against state plans to build a four-lane motorway through the valley and create a 10-hectare (25-acre) floodlit motorway exchange half a mile from the hill itself, slicing through what historians say is a hinterland of settlements and burial grounds.
St Patrick is said to have converted the Irish to Christianity here and in 1843 Daniel O'Connell addressed a gathering of 1 million in his campaign for an Irish parliament.
A pagan sanctuary which became the centre of Irish kingship, Tara served as an icon of nationalism and a symbolic battleground in the 1798 rebellion. In the late 19th century, when a group calling themselves the British-Israelites decided to excavate Tara, convinced that the ark of the covenant was buried there, outraged protesters included the poet WB Yeats.
The motorway is designed to ease the traffic horror of towns along the Meath corridor, which have become dormitory settlements for people working in post-Celtic Tiger Dublin. Those who cannot afford the house prices in the capital are moving further and further outside it.
Meath residents are painfully aware of the need for a solution to their traffic problems; in rush hour it takes two and a half hours to travel a stretch of road that can be covered in 30 minutes in the dead of night.
On a good day you can see half the counties of Ireland from the Hill of Tara. It is not its beauty that drives campaigners, but its archaeological and historical importance as the "heart and soul of Ireland" and one of the few prehistoric landscapes in Europe that is still intact.
They are demanding soul-searching about Ireland's apparent lack of respect for its history now that it has become wealthy.
The motorway plans have been passed by Ireland's planning board, despite the campaign by archaeologists and local groups, and are now sitting on the desk of the new environment minister, he thingy Roche, who has the power to say yes or no. A decision is imminent.
As the campaign enters its final stage the Irish actor Stuart Townsend and his Oscar-winning girlfriend, Charlize Theron, have voiced their support.
Dozens of academics from Ireland and abroad have written of their concerns in the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune. Dennis Harding of the archaeology department at Edinburgh University called the plans "an act of cultural vandalism as flagrant as ripping a knife through a Rembrandt painting".
Archaeologists who have researched Tara say the nine-mile stretch of the new M3 motorway will mean the excavation of at least 28 sites and monuments in the road's corridor. But these, they say, will be "ultimately destroyed".
They expect many more sites to be affected, with 48 archaeological zones within 500 metres of the road corridor and around one site every 300 metres along the road itself.
Conor Newman of the archaeology department at the National University of Ireland, Galway, is the director of a state-funded archeological research programme at the Hill of Tara.
"They are knowingly putting this four-lane motorway through the middle of what is actually a relatively compact but uniquely important archaeological landscape," he said.
"I don't mean landscape in an aesthetic sense, I mean landscape in an archaeological and historical sense. They are doing it willingly when they could have come up with alternative ideas."
He said archaeologists had not been listened to.
What puzzles many international archaeologists is why Ireland has chosen this motorway route at a time when British authorities are spending hundreds of millions of pounds trying to undo past mistakes at Stonehenge. There they are grassing over one road and burying another in a tunnel to remove traffic from the surroundings of the ancient monument.
Edel Bhreathnach, a medieval historian at University College Dublin, and editor of a forthcoming book on kingship and the landscape of Tara, said if the government approved the motorway it would be "the decision of a people who no longer understand their past".
The road authorities have already dug test trenches along the corridor of the motorway, identifying 28 sites which they could excavate before building.
Dr Bhreathnach said she was unhappy about hurried excavations. "You should only excavate as part of a research project," she said.
Julitta Clancy of Meath Archaeological and Historical society said her family suffered horribly from the traffic congestion, with her student daughter having to take out a loan to live in Dublin as she could not commute to college.
"We desperately need a traffic solution here in Meath, but we just want it rerouted away from a sensitive landscape," she said