HISTORY OF MEATH

Meath has come down in the world.   When the name first emerges from the mists of the history, it is of a kingdom, the middle kingdom as its name indicates, possession of which, or power over, which made respectable, though not effective the claim of its ruler to be High King of Ireland.   It became a Liberty  in 1172 when presented by the Angevin King Henry II to Hugh De Lacy and by 1542, divided into two, Westmeath and Eastmeath, the eastern part became known as Meath, the county of today.

Meath in Pre-History

The first traces left by prehistoric man recognizes in the last few years are, the flints of Mesolithic man, man the hunter, left around Randlestown near Navan, 9500 or so years ago.   With the remains of Mount Sandal, Co. Antrim and Lough Boora, Co. Offaly, these are the earliest imprints known today made by man on the soil of Ireland since the great ice caps melted, and the country covered with oak and hazel on low ground, and elm on high ground, became habitable for human beings.

In fact the earliest piece of material shaped by the hand of man found on the soil of Ireland, a piece of roughly chipped flint; was found at Mel, just west of Drogheda, not five miles from the county boundary.   This piece, worked by Paleolithic or old stone age man, is not enough to establish the presence of man in Ireland before the last ice age 2000,000 years ago; it could have been deposited by melting ice which had moved slowly carrying it from what is now Great Britain, or even further east; but it does make feasible a possibility that the great moving ice sheets, did in fact, scour the under-lying land of the presence of old stone age man in Meath and in Ireland.

Again by accident as at Randlestown– there the Mesolithic remains turned up in archaeological investigations of an Iron Age ring fort – traces of later Mesolithic man have turned up in John Bradley’s exploration of a crannóg, or lake dwelling at Moynagh near Nobber.   The paucity of these remains and their scarcity over a period of over 4000 years reveal the first inhabitants of County Meath, hunting for a precarious living, and being threatened in every generation with the likelihood of extinction.

The first farmers who came to Ireland, increasing the food supply and providing a surplus of energy, spent in stone monuments, called in modern times Court Cairns, have survived on the soil of Meath through the post holes of three of their modest oval huts about 5 metres in diameter that have been found in the hill called Slieve Breagh at Rathkenny, just north west of Slane.   It is a barren highland from which eight counties can be seen, and is covered with earth works from both the Bronze and Celtic Iron ages.   It has both atmosphere, eerie and vigorous, presence, and, seen in winter weather, a capacity to reflect something of the pain, strength and stoicism of the so called Court Cairn people who settled there.

The next people who came to County Meath, again like the first farmers, defined by their monuments to the dead, the Passage Grave people, left a more substantial mark on the landscape.   From the Four Knocks on the east of the county not far from the sea through the complex of cemeteries, caught in a crook of the Boyne river five miles from Drogheda to the Slieve na Gallaigh cemetery perched on the highest point of the county, where one cairn about 900 feet above sea level almost comes within the definition of a mountain, spectacular examples of the architecture of these people survive on the landscape.

The best known of course is Newgrange where people, with stone and wood implements not only raised a great mound of 2000,000 tons of gravel containing a passageway of 62 feet long ending in a chamber, decorated with abstract art, sometimes of the highest quality, but also revealed a control over astronomical information – the rising sun about the winter solstice hits a roof box over the entrance to the mound, creeps up the passageway and lights up the corbelled chamber for nearly fifteen minutes – unique in the Neolithic world.  Knowth, in course of excavation, has also yielded new surprising information about these people.   Two passages facing east and west have been found there in one of which an astropomorphic image on a large stone which is a masterpiece art.   Found too, at Knowth was a ceremonial mace head of flint, again with a stylized human image – semi-abstract art of highest quality.   The visible achievement of these people in Meath 5500 years ago reflect a social achievement of which the monuments are the mirror, a structured quasi urban life sustained by a generous supply of food; the beginnings in short of civilization.

The succeeding neolithic peoples with different burial habits – they built a simple grave or dolmen – are not as well represented in Meath as their predecessors, though there is a dolmen at Rathkennynorth of Navan, and a small number of single graves have, in fact, being found.   Some say that the existence of the simple grave as the normal burial pattern reflects a movement away from a closely knit community, bound in familial allegiance that finds expression in a communal grave, to a society divided between an emerging warrior elite that found heroic expression in a single grave culture, and a labouring subject majority whose graves have not survived at all.

At any rate in the years about 2000 B.C. a new people made their presence felt in Meath – the so called Beaker people [ they placed a beaker in their single graves] who came here looking for easily workable sources of pure copper which they eventually mixed with imported  tin to produce bronze.   They found such sources in the quartz outcropping still evident at Kentstown where the Nanny river begins its road to the sea.   They built at Newgrange beside the great mound then 1500 years old, a great wooden hinge or circle at which they put charred animal remains in specially prepared pits.   It has the greatest dimensions of any henge in Western Europe and in it, the post holes of houses have been found.   It was followed by the great stone circle that, with a few gaps, still surrounds the original Neolithic mound.   Some say that the very large circle known as Queen Maeb’s Rath at Tara is also a beaker settlement, made near the Neolithic passage grave there, known as the Mound of Hostages.   Again and again succeeding people were attracted to, and adapted, to their own needs and customs the monuments left by their predecessors.

Meath being blessed with excellent soil attracted every new people to settle on its land.   In the late Bronze Age the Mound of the Hostages itself a Neolithic grave, was used for Bronze Age burial; one grave, of a teenager of some importance, yielded a necklace of amber and faience, the former an import from the eastern Baltic sea, the latter a milky blue bead made in Egypt, both showing the far flung trade contacts of Meath in the Bronze Age.

In the centuries before the birth of Christ a new technology, art style and point of view from which to measure human values shaped the culture of people living in Meath.   The celtic centuries had begun.   The secret of making furnaces hot enough to smelt iron made for an advanced iron technology, the adaption of the La Tene motifs or decoration, on bronze and stone at first in the northern half of the country reveals a people with a flair for seeing mysterious quasi divine forces behind natural phenomena, and the familiar character of the basic political unit, the vath, of which there were about eight in what is now Co. Meath, implies an incapacity for empire characteristic of the whole Celtic world.   The physical expression of this on the landscape is of course the absence of any large scale buildings for political or religious purposes.

The dwelling units of the Irish Celts dot the landscape, mostly circular rings of earth thrown up from, and creating a surrounding ditch inside, which were the ephemeral huts for humans and animals.   Below the surface of the ground at these, so called ring forts, found very frequently in Co.Meath are the L shaped tunnels called sousterrains which seem to have been places of refuge from frost and enemy alike, and perhaps cool storage places for food and perishable goods.   In Meath too, are some spectacular Celtic sites, spectacular not because of buildings, but because of view and position.   There is the Hill of Ward near Athboy, a tri-vallate ringfort much disturbed since; the sites about Teltown  which relate to those sacred games held every three years, at which was reaffirmed the marriage of him who claimed to be High King to his people; and of course Tara itself, a complex of ringforts on a grand scale, centred on the Neolithic passage grave called the Mound of Hostages, entered by an imposing sacred way and dominating the surrounding central plain of the county.

The primary political unit in Celtic Ireland was the tuath, of which there were about eight in Meath, ruled by a chief, or petty king chosen from the extended family of his predecessor.   The names of these petty kingdoms have often survived as the names of baronies in early modern Meath; Lune and Morgallion reveal the presence of the Luaigne [followers of the Celtic God Lugh], and the Gailenga.   The chiefs paid or received tribute from one another and all paid tribute to a ri coicead, the provincial King of Meath whose sway stretched from the Shannon to the sea.   Below the chief were, the representatives of his family, and the independent farmers whose ringforts still cover the county.   With him the learned classes, interpreters of the law, doctors, the poets and genealogists and the free tradesmen made up the free inhabitants of the tuath; below them the unfree, servants, labourers and musicians, worked to keep the rest in relative comfort.

In the early Celtic age, about the time of Christ, the provincial centre was at Tara which had such a hold on the imagination of the people of the area, that even when it was long abandoned as a centre of power, the king of Tara was the coveted of the provincial king of Meath.