Hill of Tara -The Later History of Tara

Tara, as it is documented in sources dating from the twelfth century onwards, is treated in two contrasting ways. Anglo-Norman and later administrative sources deal with land ownership around Tara and the benefices of the church at Tara. The Anglo-Norman family, de Repenteni, owned land at Tara until the mid-seventeenth century and while Tara became the centre of a parish in the fourteenth century, some of its income was given by the de Repenteni family to St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin.

Irish sources continue the medieval tradition of emphasizing Tara’s mythical, royal and symbolic attributes. Seventeenth-century texts such as The Annals of the Four Masters or Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland Foras Feasa ar Éirinn claim that Tara was the seat of the high-kings of Ireland from time immemorial. Its attraction as a powerful symbol was called upon to reinforce various political campaigns, most notably in 1641, 1798 and 1843. When the British-Israelites, - whose beliefs based on biblical references matched with Irish mythical traditions convinced them that the Ark of the Covenant was buried at Tara,- dug out the Rath of the Synods between 1899 and 1903, their actions were criticized fiercely through a national and an international media campaign waged by prominent decolonizing nationalists, Maud Gonne, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Griffith and Douglas Hyde. This controversy was a reflection of the greater conflict between the varying traditions in Ireland at the time, appropriately with Tara at its heart.