Navan Fort New technology offers a fascinating insight into the religious nature of the early Irish writes Jason Osborne
The veil of time has been pulled back and a direct glimpse into Ireland’s pre-historic past was offered as a joint team of archaeologists from Belfast and Aberdeen unearthed what they believe to be evidence of a series of monumental complexes at Navan Fort. Navan Fort is located in Co. Armagh and boasts deep ties to many of the island’s oldest myths, sagas and legendary figures, such as the TáinBóCúailnge, CúChulainn, and Conchobar mac Nessa. Known as the ‘Emain Macha’ in Irish, it served as the headquarters to the Red Branch Knights of Ulster in early Irish mythology. Beyond this, it is reputedly one of the prehistoric provincial capitals, based on information granted us by early sources. Tara, Knockaulin, and Cruachan were identified as the centres of the others.
Despite Navan Fort’s firm rooting in both the Irish landscape and its history, the fort continues to influence and shape the minds of those seeking to discover its secrets. Foremost among these is Dr Patrick Gleeson, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University Belfast and leader of the recent, revealing survey.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, he offered a glimpse behind the curtain of Ireland’s ancient ways. “I’m a landscape archaeologist which means most of the time, I’m interested in the ways in which people use places. So, the specific periods that I’m interested in are the later prehistoric period and the medieval period in northern Europe, and to date most of my work is in Ireland and focuses on cult landscapes, royal places and kingship.” These areas of interest make Dr Gleeson uniquely suited to interpret many of the relics of Ireland’s past, with the country being a tapestry of religious and political history.
“I work at quite a lot of places around Ireland and I work with colleagues in other places too, but probably the places your readers would be most familiar with would be places like the Rock of Cashel in Co. Tipperary, places like LagoreCrannóg or Tara in Co. Meath. And then we work in places like Dunseverick on the north coast and Navan Fort obviously in Co. Armagh, and a few other royal and religious places around the island, but those would be the main ones.”
International Team
Dr Gleeson does not work in isolation, but rather is joined by an international team as they attempt to piece together the shape of northern Europe’s past: “The work at Navan was funded through a project that we have with colleagues in the University of Aberdeen led by Prof. Gordon Noble, in Aberdeen, and that’s called the Comparative Kingship Project. What we’re interested in for that project is the origins and evolution of kingdoms in northern Europe, particularly in Ireland and Scotland, so there’s a number of ongoing projects in places like Burghead, Rhynie, and Tap O’ Noth in Scotland, but the Irish work is focused on the Rock of Cashel, Dunseverick on the north coast of Antrim, and Navan Fort.”
This recent survey of Navan Fort provided researchers a unique opportunity to probe the largely hidden nature of the monument. They used techniques that are revealing increasing amounts as they become more widely used. “There hasn’t really been this sort of large-scale remote sensing survey previously at Navan Fort. These are techniques that are used quite regularly, and it’s become relatively standard practice in recent decades. The technologies are completely non-invasive which means we can cover quite a lot of ground with relatively few resources and get some good results. It has been used to great effect in places like BrúnaBóinne or the Newgrange landscape, around the Hill of Tara, or places like Rathcroghan. Also at the Rock of Cashel, we’ve done some work there previously too. So, this is kind of the first attempt to use those methods at Navan and they’ve thrown up some really interesting results,” he says.
Dr Gleeson shared more about technology’s role in helping us to understand a prehistoric age: “This allows us to map the below-ground archaeology by measuring the magnetic signatures and the electrical resistance of the soil, and allows us to basically detect what archaeology exists below-ground for which there is no above-ground trace.”
Fieldwork wasn’t always so cutting-edge, however, with the initial exploration of Navan Fort being done manually through excavation, Dr Gleeson says: “There was a long history of research at Navan and that includes excavations from the 1960s onwards, and then in the 1990s there were the last excavations, and they identified a whole series of buildings from the Iron Age period; the early Iron Age and possibly the later Iron Age, too.”
Navan Fort
If the inhabitants of Navan Fort built atop the work of those who came before, throughout the centuries, so too are the archaeologists today. As is the way of the scientific method, their research continues the story that others started decades ago. “Our research shows that the earthworks that stand on the site today aren’t, as was previously thought, the final phase of activity at the site. The site was told in medieval sources as having grass growing and abandoned, but actually it’s part of a much, much longer history. We’ve added a new monumental phase in the early Iron Age where the previously excavated buildings can be shown to be part of a much larger ritual complex, and then we’ve also added activity in the medieval period, so in say the first millennium AD and the start of the second millennium AD. Particularly, we’ve added knowledge that was previously unknown at any of these royal centres: is Tara, Rathcroghan, etc., for what it possibly royal residences. So a large, timber building and large enclosures that possibly belonged to a medieval residential phase, that would explain the past of Navan as a place associated with the kings of Ulster in myths and sagas in the medieval period,” he explains.
The history of politics is evident at Navan Fort, but that is not the only area that these findings shed light on; the survey added significant data which hinted at “a series of massive temples, some of the largest and most complex ritual arena of any region of later prehistoric and pre-Roman Northern Europe,” Dr Gleeson revealed in a statement shortly after the announcement of the findings.
He says this pronouncement further as he spoke to The Irish Catholic: “So the reason that places like Navan and Tara are famous is because we’re told in medieval sources that they are the ancient capitals and seats of kings of the five provinces of Ireland. That was probably the reason that they started to be studied from the 1960s onwards; to understand these residential places and these royal places, but the evidence that was uncovered didn’t really fit that mould.”
The work of an archaeologist may play out like that of a detective in a thriller; a site may appear to have yielded up all of its secrets, before fresh evidence is turned up to reopen the case. “There was a lot of Iron Age activity and even some older activity uncovered, but the vast majority of it seemed to point to ritual and ceremonial functions for these places. Now that’s been debated, and shifted to and fro over the last couple of decades too, but it does seem now the case that these aren’t just royal residences in the later prehistoric period, in say, the Iron Age; they are more likely regional centres of ritual and ceremonial activity for their respective regions if not, kind of, super-regional, and centres of authority and spiritual significance as well,” he says. “At Navan, that seems to be the case, particularly what we’ve identified with the figure of eight-shaped buildings that had previously been excavated. They sit in a much, much larger monumental complex that is also perhaps arranged in a figure of eight shape. So instead of just being residential structures, they now seem to be, to us at least, ritual structures that have some sort of cosmic significance associated with their shape and their form.”
Picture
Findings like these help to build up a picture of Ireland’s ancient past. If the religious shape of a previous society can be accurately formed, that affords researchers more insight into the ways of life on every level. Fortunately for those operating in these rugged and mysterious isles at the edge of the Atlantic, a trail is appearing that promises greater understanding of the past. “The figure of eight buildings are quite significant because there’s been a small handful of those that have been excavated, but they are only found at those royal centres that I’ve mentioned previously, so places like Tara and Knockaulin, so they do seem to be associated with these particular types of sites. There has been some suggestion that there might be some evidence for them in places in Britain, but they do seem to be slightly different and it’s not the same sort of character. In places like Stanwick or in places in Aberdeenshire, there’s similar forms of architecture to that which you find at some of the Irish sites, but they’re very different in others. It does seem that they are some sort of common currency in terms of the architecture of religious or ritual space that is used in the Iron Age in Ireland, so that is one of the reasons we think they’re significant buildings. To contextualise them further with the same sort of symbolism and format in a much, much larger monument does suggest that that is significant,” Dr Gleeson Says.
Organised Society
These trends and threads paint a rich picture of Ireland’s past, one in which we see an organised society on at least the religious and political levels. However, much more work needs to be done before a comprehensive understanding is acquired: “To a certain degree, it confirms some of the recent suspicions about these places in terms of how we understand and re-interpret some of the evidence that had been excavated previously. I suppose it also gives us new information too, especially identifying the much larger monumental complex. It is some new evidence that we’re still sifting through, but there isn’t a huge amount of comparison on the island of Ireland for that, in terms of its scale and complexity. There’s maybe a couple centring around those royal sites but they are, relatively speaking, unique centres.”
While some parts of the picture remain highly fragmented, others show signs of coming together nicely. Dr Gleeson explains: “The other element with our research that is quite significant, in terms of understanding religious significance and change, is that as a part of the article that we’ve published, we’ve suggested that one of the buildings that had previously been excavated is actually much later in date, probably belonging to the seventh century AD, so the conversion period of Ireland to Christianity. Alongside that, we’ve also identified medieval activity at the site which wasn’t known previously, so we can show that the site continued to be used throughout the first millennium AD and perhaps later.”
Here we appear to have a tenuous, but real, link between the past and the present, a sentiment with which Dr Gleeson agrees: “So it’s no longer a, kind of, grass-grown, abandoned pagan place. When Christianity comes to Ireland, it seems continuous.” The idea of St Patrick living and working alongside a society unaccustomed to the message he carried is one from which all Catholics can draw inspiration, and the firmer the ties between past and present become, the clearer a story there is to look to from which to draw hope and nourishment.
It takes many hands to draw Ancient Ireland out of the murky past, and Dr Gleeson’s project has involved many: “Our project is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, so we have historians, people like Nick Evans, that work on the project. The fieldwork element in this context is led by my colleague James O’Driscoll who’s a specialist in geophysical survey.”
Mythology
The necessity of the multifaceted approach is made clear: “These are incredibly laden places. They’re laden very much with mythology and saga, and that means they’re very, very rich places to study. But that can also come with its problems, where if you rely too much on that, it can give you expectations, or influence the way you might understand the structure. For instance, when the structures were first excavated back in the 1960s, they were understood as residences because the texts told us that these were residential places, and now we’re feeling that that isn’t the case. So for us really, we wanted to try and understand these places as an archaeological complex, and understand how they developed archaeologically first, and then hopefully at a later stage we will be able to engage with the mythology and the saga and the symbolism associated with the site and the stories in a much greater degree.”
There are many mysteries surrounding Ireland’s progression through the ages, and Dr Gleeson and the rest of the team on the project remain committed to solving them: “So they’re all the questions that we’ve yet to really answer, but I suppose the important thing for us at this stage is to try and let the archaeology speak for itself and try and understand that first.”
As Ireland struggles to form an understanding of itself in the fluidity of the modern age, the work of Dr Gleeson, and all those who unearth the past, provides a valuable piece in the puzzle of the country’s identity.