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TARA , the home of the High Kings of Ireland and source of so many of the great tales, looks nowadays like nothing so much as a neatly kept nine-hole golf course: a gently undulating swath of green marked out by archeological plaques. Imagining the palace, whose wood-and-wattle structures have entirely disappeared, leaving only scars in the earth, isn't easy. But it's an effort worth making, for this was a great royal residence, already thriving before the Trojan Wars and still flourishing as late as the tenth century AD. The origins of the site are lost in prehistory, but it originally probably had a religious significance, gradually growing from the base of a local priest-king to become the seat of the High Kings. Its heyday came in the years following the reign of the legendary Cormac Mac Art in the third century AD - when five great highways converged here: this was a ritual, rather than a residential, centre - and by the time of the confrontation of St Patrick with King Laoghaire in the fifth century, its power was already declining. The title of High King was not, on the whole, a hereditary one: rather the kings were chosen, or won power, on the battlefield. So they were not necessarily local, or even permanently based here, but all evoked the spirit of Tara as the basis of their power. In later history, there was a minor battle at the site during the 1798 Rebellion, and in 1843 Daniel O'Connell held a mass "Monster" meeting - said to have attracted as many as a million people (a quarter of Ireland's population today) - as part of his campaign against union with Britain. You'll find the site signposted just off the N3. From the car park it appears as a wild meadow on a table-top hill, no more than 300ft above the surrounding countryside; just beside the car park is the Banquet Hall Cafe , (daily 9.30am-6pm). There is a plan near the entrance, which will help you to identify the various mounds. The path to the site leads through the yard of the old Church of Ireland, which is now used as a visitor centre (May to mid-June 9.30am-5pm; mid-June to mid-Sept 9.30am-6.30pm; mid-Sept to Oct 10am-5pm; GBP1.50/?1.90), with a romantic but reasonably sophisticated audio-visual show that gives some background to Tara's history and also, more valuably, shows a number of aerial views that do a lot to make sense of the design. The church itself, dating from 1822, is a modest grey building typical of the Anglican churches found all over Ireland; somehow it seems fitting that it should find a role participating in the re-enhancement of a more ancient landscape that its builders once attempted to dominate. The church's only remarkable feature is a bright stained-glass window by the well-known Dublin artist Evie Hone, which was installed in 1935 to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of the visit of St Patrick to the site and thus the coming of Christianity to Ireland. St Patrick challenged the then High King at Tara, Laoghaire, by lighting his paschal (Easter) flame on the nearby Hill of Slane in defiance of the holy fire at Tara - thereby demonstrating the ritual sympathies of the new religion with the old. Once you are on top of what is actually very rich pasture, the power of the setting immediately becomes clear, with endless views that take in whole counties, their patchwork fields and a huge sky.
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