The Mound of the Hostages

The Mound of the Hostages (Duma na nGiall) is the oldest visible monument on the Hill of Tara, one of the most famous places in Ireland. The mound, which encases a megalithic tomb built before 3000 BC, was used as a place for the deposition of human remains for more than 1,500 years after its construction. By then, arguably, the mythical status of Tara had already begun to crystallise, and the extensive ritual landscape we see there today had begun to take shape.

The Mound of the Hostages, Tara: a pivotal monument in a ceremonial landscape, Muiris O’Sullivan, 2006.

The oldest visible building at Tara is the small passage-grave on the summit of the hill which is known as the Mound of the Hostages. The name comes from some of the many mythological stories associated with the monument. The monument is undifferenciated, with one fairly small chamber and no side recesses. The Mound of the Hostages was built during the mid-neolithic around 3500 BC, with continual re-use for 1,500 years, right throughout the bronze age which followed the neolithic farming era.

While the Mound of the Hostages remained unopened it was the subject of many fantastic and mythological stories, and was considered to be a major sidhe or entrance into the Otherworld. The monunent was excavated by both Seán P. Ó Ríordáin beginning in 1952 and completed by Ruaidhrí de Valera in 1959, following Ó Ríordáin's sudden death.

The short passage within the Mound of the Hostages, which is four meters long, is oriented to the southeast, allegedly to the sunrises on Samhain and Imbolc, the November and Feburary cross-quarter days. However, the passage is so short that the sun can enter for a number of days around the crossquarter days, and the monument is most likely aligned on the minor lunar standstills. A similar alignment is found at Listoghil, the central monument at Carrowmore in County Sligo and a number of monuments at Loughcrew megalithic complex, which is visible from the top of the Hill of Tara.

The Chamber

The chamber at the Mound of the Hostages is divided into three compartments by two sill stones; the floor was paved with large flat flagstones. There is one decorated stone, a large flat slab on the left side of the chamber.

The mound was excavated by Sean P. O'Riordan between 1955 and 1959; what you see today is the restored mound after the excavation. O'Riordan found evidence of an earlier structure under the mound. There is a stone cairn covered by a clay mantle. The Mound of the Hostages is three meters high, twenty-one meters in diameter and is one of the few known sites of this kind with no evidence of kerbstones. Fourknocks to the northeast is another example of a passage-grave with no kerbstones.

When Ó Ríordáin began exploring the Mound of the Hostages, his priority as an archaeologist was to adopt a clinical approach, impervious to prevailing ideas about the site. He soon discovered that the earthen mound had served as a cemetery during the early Bronze Age. Continuing his investigations, he revealed the entrance to a megalithic tomb on the eastern side of the mound. This tomb contained a rich and complex assemblage of human bone, pottery and a variety of stone and bone objects, mainly personal ornaments.

The earliest features recorded underneath the Mound of the Hostages date from about the mid-fourth millennium (cal.) BC and include the remains of individual fires, spreads of charcoal and a ditch running partially underneath the cairn. The pits and fires could plausibly be interpreted as part of the preparatory ritual for the construction of the tomb, but the ditch is less easy to explain in this way. It arcs under the western part of the cairn and may mark the eastern edge of an enclosure focused to the west of the Mound of the Hostages.

If there was a pre-cairn enclosure, what was its purpose? Early Neolithic hilltop enclosures are known in Ireland (there may have been one at Knowth, for example) and it is possible that their function was to host ceremonial occasions. In the centuries after 3500 (cal.) BC, as the process of building the megalithic tomb began, any unevenness in the ground was submerged beneath a layer of soil and the orthostats defining the passage tomb were erected in a specially prepared slot-trench. The tomb consists of three successive compartments separated by low sill stones, the roof stones surviving over the two inner compartments. Megalithic art was applied to two of the orthostats. Uniquely, three cist-like structures were built against the outer faces of the orthostats and filled with cremated human bone. Here, and in the tomb, the excavators in the 1950s recovered a remarkable collection of burnt and unburnt human bone, representing hundreds of individuals, accompanied by a rich array of artefacts, some of which are decorated.

The ancient rituals give us an uneasy glimpse of the prehistoric subconscious. We may wonder, for example, why so many unburnt human skulls lay buried together in the cremated bone in the middle part of the tomb, with no corresponding torsos or limbs. Without allowing our imaginations to lead us to dark places, we might ask why infant long-bones, always unburnt long-bones, turned up occasionally but consistently amongst the cremated adult bone. This suggests that human bone deposition at Tara may not simply have been a final service to an individual, a formal leave-taking in the manner of today, but rather an element of ceremonies focused on the place itself.

Foundation rituals, for example, appear to have played an important role at the Mound of the Hostages. Collections of human bone were found in the foundation trench of the tomb, banked against the backs of orthostats and knowingly deposited rather than accidentally lost from the tomb. Traces of human and animal bones, as well as a mass of soft organic material, were located beneath the centre of the covering cairn. Furthermore, a series of small bone cremation deposits, many in specially arranged stone settings, were placed in the ground around the perimeter of the area covered by the cairn and have produced radiocarbon determinations centring around 3200 (cal.) BC. At least one of these cremations was found c. 10m west of the cairn, in a narrow extension of the excavation beyond the immediate environs of the mound. This raises the possibility of undiscovered Neolithic deposits elsewhere on the hill, especially to the west of the Mound of Collection of Neolithic artefacts found amongst the cremated human bone in the megalithic tomb, Mound of the Hostages.

The mound produced one of the largest collection of burials and associated artifacts from any Irish neolithic site. These finds included a thirty centimeter thick layer of cremated bones and a whole range of pendants, antler pins, pottery shards, stone balls and both a large and a miniature Carrowkeel-ware pot, each of which contained cremated and unburned human remains.

Use for burial continued throughout the Bronze age, when nearly forty cremated burials were placed in the clay mantle of the mound. There was one inhumation, the body of a fourteen year old boy, which was placed under a burial urn. Finds with this burial included fiaence beads which came from the eastern Mediterranean.

The Lia Fáil, or Stone of Destiny, which now stands at the centre of a fort called the Forrad, is believed to have originally stood outside the entrance to the Mound of the Hostages. This Stone was moved to its present location at the centre of the Forraid in 1824 to commemorate the Battle of Tara which took place in 1798. The Stone marks the mass grave of four-hundred United Irishmen put to death here.

The stone is a granite pillar, 1.5 meters tall, and is said to be one of the four treasures brought to Ireland by the Tuatha De Danann. Its fame rests in its power to recognise the legitimaite king: it would emit a mighty roar when the true king stood upon it, though some say it lost this power when Christ was born. The stone is extremely phallic in shape, so no wonder that that its Irish name is Bodh Fergus, Fergus' Penis. Fergus was Fergus Mac Roi, a champion of Ulster, one of Cuchullain's teachers and a lover of Queen Maeve.

Excavations at the Mound of the Hostages

In the early summer of 1952 the then taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, turned the first sod of the Tara excavation project in a ceremony witnessed by a large crowd of spectators. The excavations were directed by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, Professor of Celtic Archaeology at University College Dublin, who had previously conducted large-scale excavations at Lough Gur in County Limerick, amongst other important sites. Initially he focused on Ráith na Senad, which had previously been investigated by the British Israelites. He also explored the northern boundary of Ráith na Ríg, and in 1955 he turned his attention to the Mound of the Hostages. After his second season, in 1956, Ó Ríordáin fell ill. He died in 1957, and it was his successor in UCD, Professor Ruaidhrí de Valera, who completed the excavation of the Mound of the Hostages in 1959. Finally, as part of the Discovery Programme investigation of Tara in the 1990s, Helen Roche re-excavated Ó Ríordáin’s cuttings across the ditch of Ráith na Ríg.

The Mound of the Hostages, Tara: a pivotal monument in a ceremonial landscape, Muiris O’Sullivan, 2006.

It has been suggested that the Stone of Scone was the Ulster coronation stone, and that there was one for each provence; indeed, each local tribal area would have had its own inauguration stone.

O'Riordain had a section dug across the bank and ditch in 1953, and found that the ditch was 3.5 meters deep and cut from bedrock. Another excavation was undertaken by Helen Roche in 2002, and the ditch was dated to the Iron age, about 100 BC.