Travel The Middle Kingdom After 55 years living in an Irish castle, Valerie Pakenham has written a book on the ancient splendours of Meath
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reland once had five provinces. The smallest was the kingdom of Meath – or Midhe – meaning the Middle Kingdom. The story, as told by Gerald of Wales (1146-1223), was that, sometime in the Dark Ages, four brothers divided Ireland between them and then allotted their youngest brother, Slanius (or Slaine), a small portion of each their share so he would not feel hard done by. Slanius is said to have gratefully received these allotments. He soon expanded his little kingdom and in due course became the first High King. The original sharing-out is believed to have taken place on the Hill of Uisneach, the mystic centre of Ireland. There is a huge boulder there called the Stone of the Divisions, said to mark the exact spot. Fifty-five years ago, I was lucky enough to be brought to live not far away. My husband, the writer Thomas Pakenham, had recently inherited Tullynally, a family castle in County Westmeath, and badly needed a wife to keep him company. The castle was huge, damp, semi-ruinous and probably not to most people’s taste. ‘It’s not a pretty house, darling,’ said my mother with her usual frankness. But its surroundings were stunning – its romantic parkland was ringed with
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beautiful hills, and just beyond them lay an eight-mile-long limestone lake. This was Lough Derravaragh, the setting for an Irish legend about the Children of Lir, who were turned into swans by their jealous stepmother, but kept their human voices and lived here for 300 years. And all around were yet more lakes, hills topped with mysterious raths or ringforts. Four miles away, at Fore, there was a 14th-century abbey, and ten miles away were the Loughcrew hills, crowned with a string of passage graves, said to be Europe’s largest neolithic cemetery. Over the years, I have explored these places many times, and enjoyed wonderful swimming in assorted Westmeath lakes. In the meantime, we have restored our enormous castle (it now houses eight families, as well as us) and rescued the gardens from their previous jungle of laurels and rhododendron. Replanted by Thomas with exotic trees and flowers, they now, I am glad to say, attract hordes of visitors in summer. But our beautiful surrounding landscape remains largely unknown. Tourists still speed through the Irish midlands to the west of Ireland, in search of the mountains and sea. So, after many years of trying to promote Westmeath, I have had a brainwave: I must reconnect
it to its earlier self, as part of the Middle Kingdom, which for more than a thousand years stretched from the Shannon to the Irish Sea. For most of these years, it was ruled by the O’Neill kings, who had their main stronghold beside Lough Ennell, guarding the royal road from Tara to Clonmacnoise, and extracted tribute from as far away as Viking Dublin. After the Norman invasion in the 1170s, Henry II claimed the kingdom as his personal possession and declared it the Royal Province of Meath. He appointed as his deputy, or justiciar, Hugh de Lacy, a man of demonic energy and drive. De Lacy built defensive castles all over the place and made Drogheda on the Boyne estuary his port of entry. He made his central power base 30 miles upriver at Trim, where his magnificent castle still stands. But much of Western Meath was never fully subdued, and Norman outposts such as the abbey at Fore were under constant attack. You can still see the stone in the cloister where the monks were said to sharpen their swords. In 1545, Henry VIII split the royal province into two – abandoning Western Meath to the ‘unruly Irish’. His daughter Elizabeth continued the process, splitting Western Meath into two counties,
