Free Republic

"... both Irish and Welsh sources portrayed it as a tribal migration of the Irish Dessi or Deisi headed by their own king and, from the Irish viewpoint, a suitable 'expulsion' saga was adduced. The direct line of Irish rulers of Welsh Dyfed went on into the 7th and 8th centuries. An interesting mix arose; by 400 Irish and British were fully differing languages, and additionally Christians from both nations used different scripts (Latin and Ogham) for their memorials. Irish never replaced British in Wales the way it did in Scotland, but relative numerical strengths do not necessarily explain why;...

Roman artifacts including coins, glass beads and brooches turn up in many Irish counties, especially in the east. Cahill Wilson investigated human remains... using strontium and isotope analysis and carbon dating. Remarkably, this allowed her say where they most likely spent their childhood. One burial site on a low ridge overlooking the sea in Bettystown, Co Meath, was dated to the 5th/6th century AD using radiocarbon dating. Most of the people were newcomers to the area, Cahill Wilson concluded. The clue was in their teeth. Enamel, one of the toughest substances in our body, completely mineralises around the age of...

Details of the “first passage-tomb to be discovered in in Boyne Valley in 200 years” have been reported in the Sept 7 edition of the Meath Chronicle. It was discovered by the Heritage Council Funded ‘Boyne Valley Landscapes Project’, a collaborative research project led by researchers from University College Dublin (Dr Stephen Davis and Dr Will Megarry) and Dundalk Institute of Technology (Dr Conor Brady). The newly discovered passage-tomb, on the floodplain of the Boyne southwest of Newgrange, had showed up in the lidar surface as a low rise, a mere 25cm high and 30m across, surrounded by a barely...

DROGHEDA, Ireland — Moving to a newly built seaside housing development north of Dublin seemed an obvious decision for Katrina Dooley and her partner. Fast-rising property prices in the center of the city allowed them to trade their one-bedroom apartment for a three-bedroom, red-brick house in Laytown, a coastal enclave near here, within earshot of crashing waves. Central to the couple’s calculation was being able to concentrate energy and attention on their child, Ella, 5. The problem was that hundreds of other people had the same idea, leaving a local school scrambling for space, to the point of using a...