Did "Saint Patrick" Place Military Siege Upon Tara and then Burn it to the Ground?

Anyone one who has followed my work over the years is well aware that I have no love for Saint Patrick and what he represented. He almost is certainly a work of pure fiction and may be a cover story for a military crusade. The 'simple shepherd boy' whom we are told, converted Ireland to the Middle Eastern death cult of Christianity while 'banishing the snakes' and other nonsense. Firstly, he wasn't Irish, he was a Romano Briton who was sent to Ireland by the Roman Church - as a kind of Dark Ages Henry Kissenger - to bring the Irish into the Roman legal and taxation system. Saint Patrick's dislike of the Irish should be enough to make any person of Irish heritage despise this Roman Agent and all he represented.  

He came to demolish the Irish and our culture, laws and heathenism, in much the same way Charlemagne demolished the Saxons, and tried to demolish the Norse. Despite Saint Patrick's proclamation that he was a 'simple country person' in his own biography, his family were in fact, well-to-do Romano Briton clergy, and being at the centre of their community, Patrick is actually 'Patrician'. A little known fact is that Saint Patrick's destruction of the 'pagans' ("snakes" to every drunk on March 17th) in Ireland, is so highly regarded, that among the Eastern Orthodox Church he is considered the equal of the Twelve Apostles in terms of his accomplishments in spreading the Middle Eastern death cult. 

Perhaps Saint Patrick's reputation around the Roman Empire was due specifically to his spectacular success this 'humble country lad' performed at Tara when he somehow managed to battle with the druids and capture the fortification during the Celtic feast of Beltaine. During the festival a symbolic fire  - representing the purity of the sun god Lugh - would be ignited by the pagan High King on the top of the Hill of Tara, and this fire would then be used to light all other fires in order to banish the dark days of winter. Keep in mind, that Tara was hardly a collection of a few mud huts with a small population gathered around a roasting pig on a spit. Tara at the time was essentially a capital city, with all the complexities and security one would associate with any central administrative power overseeing an island of 32,000 square miles (and also extended into large regions of western Scotland), along with its overseas, trade and maritime interests. Yet we are told a simple sheep herder single-handedly put it out of business one evening.

In typical Christian traditional disregard for other religious customs, Saint Patrick attacked Tara on the sacred festival of Beltaine. Which would be akin to attacking Washington DC on the 4th of July, or the Vatican on Christmas Day, by "lighting a fire" to terrorise the High King Laoghaire and his druids.

From this point on let's forgo the 'sainted allegory' of the events and offer more practical theories: 

Until this point, Saint Patrick was seemingly travelling around Ireland with a substantial quantity of Roman money in his possession, bribing rival kings of Laoghaire to convert to Christianity. Obviously the 'simply county boy' from Romano Britain had some serious financial and armed resources within his travelling mission in order to perform these eh 'miracles'. In his letters to the Pope, saint Patrick writes: 

"At times I gave gifts to kings, over and above what I paid to their sons who travelled with me." 

"How has this happened in Ireland? Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God. The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ!" 

Clearly these are bribes to local chieftains for military assistance. However, later on some of these 'converts' appeared to have uncovered Patrick's imperialist aims and left his camp with the money. Even so, by the time Patrick and his Irish mercenariness and traitors arrived at Tara, it must have been a substantial enough force to be able to set fire to the sacred city of the druids. We are then told druid elders were sent by King Laoghaire to investigate (delegation) and they reported back that Patrick's fire had magical powers because it would burn forever (unlimited Roman resources). Clearly Tara was under a large scale military siege by a substantial and well resourced military force under the command of Patrick and eventually King Laoghaire declared that Patrick's 'magic' was stronger than his own (capitulation to overwhelming military opposition in other words).  

In a more prosaic context, Patrick's 'magic' was the same thing as American 'freedom' today when exported to unwilling peoples, i.e; war and money. Money to bribe the local psychopaths and opportunists, and war in case not enough of them take the bribes. The same Roman system which the West has been under for 2,000 years. 

I have absolutely no doubt that Saint Patrick (or whatever his brand name actually represented) was responsible for not only the mass murder of the druids (snakes) at Lough Erne and at Tara, but may well have overseen the mass slaughter of many Irish 'unclean' pagans before his mission was complete, as he held aloft the icon of the rotting corpse of a Hebrew from the Middle East nailed to a stick as their new 'faith'.

Heathen Homes and Not Just Huts

Back in my school days we were shown a history film which portrayed the Roman arrival in Britain in 55 BC by Julius Caesar. The Romans were shown in the film as cultured and technology-possessing sophisticates, while the Native Britons were shown to be near ape-like, grunting proto-humanoids, wearing animal skins and living in mud huts. The fact that this was a British made documentary, and showed how British historians viewed their own ancestors, made me wonder about how they must have viewed the Irish from the same period...

Reconstructed large Neolithic Irish House. Note: the elegant roof line and vents on either gable to remove smoke from the central hearth via the strong cross draught the opposite openings created. 

As we now know, the image of the ancient Irish, Picts and Britons as basically biped apes, while the Romans were modern and civilised, is simply racial and cultural propaganda created and perpetrated by Victorian college professors and later on, the British Israelite movement. The notion being put 'out there' that before Roman Laws and especially before Christianity, was exclusively, that the native Europeans were simply backward and animal-like primitives. Only in the last twenty years has their been a sea change within academia to revise these prejudices towards more historically accurate portrayals. 

Among these developments is the on-going research and discovery into building types that were used outside the Roman empire. Wood decays with climate and time, and the Irish, Britons, Saxons and Norse all built their towns for the most part in wood. When wood was scarce, such as in the wind-swept Orkneys, and stone was used, as at Skara Brea, remarkable engineering and construction sophistication is clearly evident. 

Irish Viking Settlement at the Irish Heritage Folk Park

However, the use of stone for buildings was rare as high quality wood was much more readily available from the Alps to the Arctic Circle. Hence, why there are little or no great pre-Roman cities and large public buildings remaining in northern Europe, apart from their foundations which can still be uncovered. However, these structures did exist and only now - starting on a small scale - are archaeologists beginning to understand just how potentially magnificent northern European heathen architecture may have been. Rather than just circular mud and straw huts, a picture of elegance and stylish buildings is finally emerging. 

Small Cluster of Iron Age buildings at the Irish National Heritage Park. Imagine what Tara may have looked like in its heyday with even larger and more elegant structures.

There is much evidence of large halls and other structures at major pre-Christian sites such as Tara in Ireland, and Uppsala in Sweden. Rediscovered Iron Age and later wood-built urban landscapes are being unearthed all the time. Thanks to the work of reconstruction archaeologists at locations such as The Irish National Heritage Park in County Wexford, an image of elegant and impressive wood and thatch buildings is beginning to finally emerge, and which is slowly recreating the almost 'enchanted' urban landscapes of Northern Europe from the Neolithic Period to the Dark Ages. 

Early Christian Churches in Scandinavia give a good impression of the kind of large structures built by Viking communities.

Try to imagine these communities of impressive wooden structures, halls, temples and homes clustered together in clearings between the immense old growth forests of Europe and many linked together by a complex network of wood roadways built wide enough for two chariots to pass one another at speed. The occupants of these communities dressed in lavishly coloured fabrics of natural pigments and adorned with jewellery of the most intricate and complex patterns and designs. Then families retreating to their homes at the end of the day to gather around a central hearth fire and create magic, poems and legends which danced among the embers and sparks. People with no desire to cross continents and force others to live under their ways. It is a long way from the garbage they taught us in school. A very long way indeed.