I may well be having a mooch around this weekend. The diggers are in the valley, but there's no need to go overboard with the 'The Diggers are at Tara' thang. Although this may grab people's attention as soon as they realise they are over half a mile away the people soon wonder off. As I mentioned, there is a High Court appeal coming up. Permission for this was granted by the High Court last week, much to erveryone's surprise.

Many of the features being looked at aren't ritual but habitation sites. There has been one early Bronze Age burial that I know of, but much of the stuff is normal everyday stuff. This is land that has been very heavily farmed for 1000 years. There's nowt in situ in the topsoil.

There is no evidence for the valley ever having being sacred. I think it's more sacred to those that live there now than it ever was to the people using the Hill of Tara all those years ago. In the past it was all about the Hill and the land to the north of it. You can't compare the Irish Royal hilltop sites with the likes of Thornborough. You could look at Craughan in that light though as that is a lowland site that covers tens of acres. All the hilltop sites, such as Tara and Uisneach have concentrations of large amounts of monuments on the top and very little around them.

I'll also add that opposing the road on these grounds is really a no-hoper. The road should be opposed for the right reasons: IT'S NOT NEEDED AND IS A WASTE OF MONEY! All it will do is get a lot of commuters to the (not to change as far as I'm aware) bottleneck at Blanchardstown a little bit quicker where they willju st have to queue for longer to join the M50. The solution is to widen the existing road and put in a couple of bypasses around the smaller villages.

But Europe says everyone must have X miles of motorway infrastructure relative to GNP (or something) and have given Ireland the money to build it all. It's gonna get built and there ain't nothing we can do about it. Dublin will spider out even further and consume the countyside and the villages and become like the Birmingham conurbation.