TARA: Life inside the protest camp

This report from the Irish Times gives a great insight into what's happening at the Rath Lugh National Monument near the Hill of Tara. This article is available online to subscribers only, so I'll post excerpts below, and post the entire article here: http://www.globalartscollective.org/acf/news.htm

Life inside the protest camp, by Adam Harvey in Rath Lugh, Co Meath

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/newsfeatures/2008/0322/1206024739802.html

The protesters who tried - and on Thursday failed - to stop M3
construction workers cutting through an esker near the Hill of Tara
have been living for as long as two years in squalid, muddy conditions
in tents and tree houses.

RATH LUGH seems to be returning to the earth. The paths running through

the few acres of Co Meath forest are so thoroughly churned by months of

rain and foot traffic that it's impossible to get a decent toehold, and

even veteran M3 protesters, some of whom have been living in tents and

tree houses here for two years, spend their day slipping and sliding

like novices on an ice-skating rink.

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"It's not fun to be here," says Terry Canty, an intense Cork man who is
one of the permanent fixtures at the camp of protesters opposed to the
M3 motorway cutting through Co Meath's Gabhra Valley, which is littered
with significant heritage sites and within sight and earshot of the
Hill of Tara. 


"We're all covered in mud," he says. "We're filthy. We're wet.
We're sleeping in such crappy conditions. We're all so stressed and
tired. It is not fun. We're here because we think it's important,
because of this

place . . . "

–––––––––––

He's standing at a small creek at the foot of the hillside at Rath

Lugh, watching another protester, Will Burke, gently pry into a bank

beside the rivulet. Burke is scrabbling at the mud and roots to clear a

very old, man-made grotto built into the riverbank. Carefully-laid

stonework was hidden behind a thick layer of muck and grass. Now that

Burke has cleared it out, water seeps up from the ground inside the

grotto, forming a clear pool about the size and depth of a bucket of

water at the bottom of an alcove, before it trickles over more stones

and down into the creek.



About 50m away, the creek runs into a mountain of earth piled high by

the builders of the M3 motorway, and is steered into a concrete pipe

that will run under the road that's under construction. "They didn't

know it was here," says Canty. "They could have run right over it and

no one would have ever known it was here. What else are they bulldozing

over?"



The 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map that covers the Gabhra Valley, which

runs beside the Hill of Tara, is covered with the red dots and circles

that note prehistoric mounds, holy wells, barrows (earthen burial

mounds) and burial chambers. The promontory fort at Rath Lugh isn't

marked on the map - but the earthen and stone walls of the ancient

site, which archaeologists say was once a fortified outpost built

around AD 300 to watch over the approach to Tara, are apparent enough

when you walk through the forest.



Now, the promontory fort is host to a different kind of garrison.

Anti-M3 protesters have been camping here for two years, although the

bulk of them moved in about six months ago when controversy erupted

over the remains of a henge at Lismullin.



The wooden footings of an ancient ceremonial site were uncovered by

construction workers, and, after a great deal of fuss, were "preserved

by record" by the National Roads Authority (NRA), meaning that

archaeologists excavated the site before it was bulldozed. They removed

human remains found buried there, and Lismullin is now a muddy puddle

about 200m from Rath Lugh.



protesters want to ensure that other historic sites in the valley, such

as Rath Lugh, are spared the same kind of preservation.



The fort at Rath Lugh was built on a sand and gravel esker - a glacial

ridge. The motorway won't touch the remains of the fort, but a

retaining wall will have to be cut into about 50m of the esker, missing

the remains of the fort by about 20m. The NRA says it is not damaging

the fort, which is a declared national monument, and that it's not

possible to avoid the esker as there is another significant site on the

opposite side of the construction site. "If we move away from the esker

we'll hit the other national monument," says an NRA spokesman.