The Hill of Tara

← Encyclopedia

The ground gives the secret away before any monument does. Stand on the Forrad on a clear day and the eye runs unobstructed across the central plain of Ireland — Slane to the north, the Wicklow hills smudged on the southern horizon, the country falling away on every side. The hill itself is barely a hill, a long swell of pasture rising to no great height. But it commands. A king set on this ridge could be seen from far off, and could see far off in turn, and that double sightline is the whole logic of the place. Tara is not high. It is central, and it was made to be looked at.

The Irish name is Teamhair, given in the old sources as Teamhair na Rí — Tara of the Kings. Philologists trace it to a Proto-Celtic root carrying the sense of a sanctuary or set-apart space, a place cut out from ordinary ground. Whether the prehistoric builders who first raised mounds here used any such word is unknown; the name reaches us through medieval scribes writing in a converted Christian Ireland, looking back across centuries at a kingship already half-legend. What can be touched on the hill, and what is told of it, belong to different orders of certainty, and the difference matters at every step.

The Hill and Its Monuments

The archaeology of Tara is layered, and it is old. The oldest visible structure on the summit is a small passage tomb the tradition calls the Mound of the Hostages — Dumha na nGiall — built around 3200 to 3000 BCE, in the same Neolithic horizon that raised the great tombs of the Boyne a few miles north at Newgrange. It is modest beside those giants: a short stone passage under a low covering mound. But it is built with intent. The passage is oriented so that the rising sun shines into it around the cross-quarter days at the turn of winter — the festivals later called Samhain and Imbolc, the start of the dark season and the first stirring of spring. The tomb held the cremated and unburnt remains of hundreds of people, and into the old mound the Bronze Age inserted some thirty-odd later, high-status burials, one of them accompanied by a necklace of jet, amber, bronze, and faience. Two small gold torcs from around 2000 BCE were found nearby. For three thousand years before any high king is named, people were placing their dead in this hill and watching the sun come into it.

Around that ancient core the Iron Age laid the works that give Tara its royal shape. The summit is ringed by a great oval enclosure, the Ráth na Ríogh, the Fort of the Kings — roughly a kilometer in circumference, its ditch dug on the inside of its bank. That detail is telling. A defensive earthwork puts the ditch outside, to stop an attacker; a ditch cut inside the bank stops nothing and keeps nothing in but ceremony. This is the architecture of enclosure as sanctity, the marking-off of sacred from profane ground, and it dates to about the first century BCE. Within the ring sit two conjoined ringforts in a figure-eight, the Forrad — the Royal Seat — and Teach Chormaic, Cormac’s House, named for the legendary king Cormac mac Airt. North of them lies the Rath of the Synods, Ráth na Seanaidh, a multi-phase enclosure occupied in the first centuries CE that yielded Roman objects, traces of a world reaching in from outside.

The Mound of the Hostages (Dumha na nGiall), the oldest monument on Tara, viewed from the Ráth na Ríogh. Photo by Rob Hurson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Running down the northern slope are two long parallel earthen banks that the medieval texts grandly name Teach Miodhchuarta, the Banqueting Hall, and cast as the great feasting house of the kings, with the company seated by rank. Archaeology reads the banks more soberly as a ceremonial avenue or processional way, among the last of the monuments built. Even where the old learning and the spade disagree on a structure’s purpose, they tend to agree on its weight: every feature of this hill was a stage. Some twenty monuments are visible on the surface, and geophysical survey has found three times as many beneath it, a buried palimpsest of post-circles and enclosures that the eye on the grass never sees.

The Stone That Cries Out

On the Forrad stands a plain pillar of granite, roughly waist-to-shoulder height, weathered and unremarkable to look at. This is the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, and in the lore of Irish kingship it is the most charged object on the island.

The story belongs to the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine race who in the medieval pseudo-history arrived in Ireland bearing four treasures from four otherworld cities. From Falias came the Lia Fáil. It was the inauguration stone of the kingship, and it had a power of recognition: when the rightful king of Ireland set his foot upon it, or rode his chariot against it, the stone cried out — roared aloud — and the cry confirmed him. A false claimant met silence. The stone, in this telling, does not merely mark the king. It knows him. Sovereignty is not conferred by the stone so much as detected by it, as though the land itself held an opinion about who should rule and announced it through granite.

The Lia Fáil on the Forrad, Hill of Tara. Photo by Ianfhunter, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

This account comes from the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, and the cycles of tales around it — texts compiled by Christian monks centuries after the conversion of the island, who arranged the old gods into a sequence of invading peoples and treated the Tuatha Dé as ancient kings rather than deities. The roaring stone reaches us already framed by that learned, half-rationalizing hand. The pillar now on the Forrad may not even be the original; tradition holds the Lia Fáil once stood by the Mound of the Hostages and was moved, and the present stone is sometimes said to have been shifted in the early nineteenth century to mark the rebel dead of 1798. None of this dissolves the idea at the center of it, which is older and stranger than any one stone: that the right to rule was not asserted but ratified, by a thing that could tell true from false.

Kingship and the Marriage of the Land

Tara was the seat of the Ard Rí, the high king of Ireland — or rather, the seat to which the high kingship was attached as an idea. The medieval sources name a long line of kings of Tara stretching back into legend, through Cormac mac Airt and the half-historical Niall of the Nine Hostages, and into the early historic period when the dynasties of the Uí Néill held the title and made it the badge of supremacy over the other kingdoms. How much real political over-kingship Tara ever commanded is debated; the “high kingship of all Ireland” looks in part like a claim the later Uí Néill propagated and the genealogists wrote backward into the past. The prestige, though, was never in doubt. One historian observed that Tara possessed an aura that set it above every other royal seat, and the dynasties fought to own that aura precisely because it could not be built — only inherited.

What was the king of Tara, in the old conception? He was the husband of the land. The inauguration is described in the texts as a banais ríghe, a wedding-feast of kingship: a sacral marriage between the king and the goddess of the sovereignty of Ireland, flaith Érenn, personified as a woman. At Tara she bears the name Medb Lethderg; elsewhere she is Ériu herself, or Eithne, the territory made into a bride. The rite, as the literature idealizes it, turned on the goddess offering a draught to the man she chose, and on a symbolic union that made him king — not by election or conquest but by marriage to the country. A good king meant a fertile, just, peaceful land; a flawed or false king brought blight, because the marriage had failed. Sovereignty here is feminine and sovereignty is the soil, and the man is only its consort for a span.

Bound to this was the Feis Temro, the Feast of Tara — feis a word that carries the sense both of a great assembly and of a sleeping-together. Held in the dark of the year around Samhain, it was the gathering at which a reign was inaugurated and affirmed, the kingdom convened upon the hill of the kings. The annals record the Feast of Tara as a great periodic event and then record its end: the last, the texts say, was held by Diarmait mac Cerbaill in the sixth century, after which the Christian order set it aside as a relic of the old religion. The rite that married a man to a goddess had no place in the new dispensation. The hill remained; the wedding did not.

The reader should keep the registers apart here. The earthworks are first-century-BCE fact, dug and datable. The roaring stone, the four treasures, the goddess-bride, and the line of legendary kings are tradition — and a tradition transmitted by Christian scribes reshaping pagan matter into a learned national history. Between the two lies the half-historical Uí Néill kingship, real enough as politics, inflated by genealogists into a sovereignty over all Ireland that it likely never fully held. Tara is three things at once: a Neolithic burial ground, an Iron Age ceremonial enclosure, and a literary throne. They share a hill and not much else.

The Fire on the Other Hill

The most famous scene set at Tara is one in which the hill is challenged. The seventh-century Life of Patrick by the monk Muirchú tells how Patrick, come to convert Ireland, lit a great Paschal fire on the eve of Easter on the Hill of Slane, ten miles off across the Boyne valley — in defiance of a royal decree that no fire be kindled in the land before the king’s own fire was lit on Tara. The high king of the tale, Lóegaire son of Niall, sat at Tara with his druids when the unlawful flame sprang up on the far hill. The druids warned him: if that fire were not put out this very night, it would never be quenched, and would outshine the fires of the king forever. The king’s men rode against Patrick and failed. In the contest of powers that followed — a duel of saint against druid, the new fire against the old — Christianity prevailed, and Lóegaire, in Muirchú’s telling, let Patrick go on with his mission.

The scene is hagiography, written more than two centuries after the events it dramatizes, and it knows exactly what it is doing: it stages the conversion of Ireland as a fire lit against Tara, the light of the new faith kindled in deliberate breach of the old king’s law, on a neighboring hill, where the high king and his druids must watch it burn and cannot put it out. Historians note that Muirchú may have moved to Slane a fire whose memory belonged elsewhere in the Boyne valley. But the geography of the legend is its meaning. The seat of the sacred kingship is not stormed. It is simply outshone from across the valley, made to look on while its monopoly on holy fire is broken. Tara is cast, at the very moment of its eclipse, as the thing the new order had to surpass — and the casting is itself a kind of tribute.

Ruin, Excavation, and the Crowd of 1843

The kingship faded. By the high medieval period Tara was pasture; the church that gives the visitor center its building was first recorded in the twelfth century, and the hill of the kings became a hill of sheep and a name in old books. The mounds slumped under grass. For most of a thousand years Tara’s power was textual — it lived in the manuscripts, in the genealogies and the tales, more vividly than in the trodden ground.

Then, in the modern age, the ground filled again. In August 1843 Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, the man who had won Catholic Emancipation, chose Tara as the site of one of his “monster meetings” in the campaign to repeal the union with Britain and restore an Irish parliament. He chose it for everything it meant. A vast crowd assembled on and around the hill — contemporary estimates ran from several hundred thousand into the hundreds of thousands more, the figures inflated by hope and by hostile newspapers alike — and O’Connell spoke from the hill of the high kings to the largest gathering Ireland had seen, invoking the seat of the old sovereignty in the cause of a new one. He won no parliament; within months the government banned the next great meeting and his movement broke on the refusal. But the choice of ground was its own argument. Tara had become a symbol the nation could stand on.

That symbolic charge cut both ways, and sometimes badly. Between 1899 and 1902 a group of British Israelites — convinced that the Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and that the Ark of the Covenant lay buried in the hill — dug into the Rath of the Synods looking for it, gouging the monument in pursuit of a fantasy. A circle of nationalists and writers, among them W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Douglas Hyde, and Arthur Griffith, protested the desecration of the sacred hill. In the Celtic Revival then remaking Irish self-understanding, Tara stood near the center: the lost royal seat, the Teamhair of the bards, an emblem of an Ireland older and prouder than the conquest. The harp, the high kings, the Stone of Destiny — these became the furniture of a national imagination, and the green hill its hearth.

The most recent contest came over the land around the hill rather than the summit itself. In the 2000s the M3 motorway was driven through the Tara–Skryne valley, past the hill at a distance of roughly two kilometers, cutting across the wider ritual landscape of enclosures and routeways that archaeologists argued were inseparable from Tara proper. Protesters formed a human harp on the hillside; the World Monuments Fund placed Tara on its watch list of endangered sites; the road opened in 2010 over the objections. The dispute turned on a question the whole history of the place keeps posing — where the sacred hill ends and ordinary country begins, whether a thing of this kind can be ringfenced from the land it was always married to. Drive the road past it and Tara is still there, a low swell of pasture with a granite pillar on its crown, commanding the central plain, watched and watching, as it was built to be.

→ Related: Newgrange · Uisneach · Emain Macha · The Tuatha De Danann · The Dagda · Lugh · The Morrigan · Brigid Goddess · Nuada · The Celts · The Fomorians · Druids · Reincarnation · Immortality · Soul