You might not notice Skryne when you visit Tara, it is a small hill across the valley identifiable by a tower on top. Historians call it Tara’s ‘cosmological counterpoint’ which seems to mean the two are eternally linked, but in tension with each other.
Tara is the favoured one, the seat of mythical heroes and High Kings while Skryne is where people considered unfit to live at sacred Tara were banished. One such person was King Cormac mac Airt who had lost an eye. Custom demanded that a physically disfigured king could not rule at Tara so in 254 he moved to Skryne where he spent the rest of his life drawing up laws.
In 284, a famous battle was fought in the Gabhra valley between the two hills at which High King Cairbe Libechair defeated Fionn MacCumhail and his Fianna. It was not the last battle there, another was fought in the early 2000s.
The valley is named after the Gabhra River which runs through it. ‘Gabhra’ means ‘White Mare’ and the White Mare was sacred to the Celtic Iron Age sons of Mil who came to Ireland about 2,500 years ago. In their stories, the White Mare pulled the Sun Chariot across the sky and energised their adventurous and heroic spirit.
However the earlier Bronze Age inhabitants had been more into pastoral life and saw the sacred White Cow as the source of their prosperity and abundance. The nearby River Boyne was named after their Cow Goddess Boann.
All of this would have been forgotten (or unknown, in my case) if the government had not in 2005 decided to push a motorway, the M3, right through the valley. Those who knew their history were appalled. In that valley you have the Iron Age ‘White Mare’ running from the side of royal Tara to meet the Bronze Age ‘White Cow’ (the Boyne). Was this not the union of two traditions that form our culture?
The motorway gave rise to a ‘Battle of Tara’. Experts insisted the area was ‘one of the richest and best known archaeological landscapes in Europe’ and deciding its future was ‘a battle for Ireland’s soul’.
However the pragmatic developers won. It was decided that only Tara Hill itself was ‘sacred’ and the highway was run right through its valley. Skryne ended up on the wrong side of the road, maybe its fate as Tara’s ‘cosmological counterpoint’?
In fact the Gabhra does not flow directly into the Boyne. The ‘White Mare’ joins another local river, the Skane, just outside the grounds of the Columban Fathers at Dalgan Park and the two run in harmony through the park to the Boyne.
Perhaps that’s another story? I wouldn’t be surprised. The Tara landscape has stimulated people’s imagination for millennia.
Photo : Tara from Skryne, the valley.
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