Friday, May 04, 2007


Lismullen site at Hill of Tara halts M3 motorway construction

I posted Paul Muldoon's poem about the destruction of the Hill of Tara on my Yahoo! 360° blog last June. Now there is a new twist on this mismanaged cultural resource. Salvage excavation on one of the many archaeological sites within the right-of-way for the M3 motorway, Lismullen, has exposed an "enclosure" that would take years to completely excavate and may force a reroute after all.

The official announcement by the Irish Department of the Environment, Heritage & Local Government appeared this Tuesday, and a preliminary archaeological report on the site can be downloaded at saveTara.com. There have been some lively debates among Irish bloggers about the merits of postponing motorway construction on the Irish Indymedia message board as well as that of the TaraWatch Yahoo group. Blogs for The Hill of Tara and TaraWatch, on the other hand, do not appear to have many readers. An NPR story on this evening's All Things Considered that grabbed my attention featured some of the new details on the structure first reported yesterday in the Irish press.

The above aerial photograph of the Lismullen site by Paula Geraghty is part of an album posted to Photobucket by the Campaign to Save Tara.

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