The Hill of Uisneach

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A traveler coming up the green slope south of Loughnavalley finds nothing dramatic at the top. The hill rises to one hundred and eighty-two meters, no more — a long, low swell of grazed pasture, sheep moving across it, a working farm running over much of its surface. There is no cliff, no skyline of towers. And then the view opens, and the reason for the place becomes plain. On a clear day the eye reaches across a great arc of the central plain, and the old reckoning held that one could see into as many as twenty of Ireland’s traditional counties from this single ground. Uisneach is not high. It is placed — set near the geographical middle of the island, where the country falls away on every side, and where, the tradition holds, the whole of Ireland could be gathered into one sightline. That is the first thing to understand about it. The hill was chosen for what it could see and be seen from, not for any height of its own.

The name in Irish is Uisneach, and the medieval lore-keepers, who could not leave a placename without a story, derived it from an act performed on the summit. What was performed there had to do with fire, and with the cutting of tongues, and with the marking of a center; and to follow it one has to move between three quite different kinds of knowing — what the spade has turned up, what the late texts assert, and what the myth holds to be true of the place beneath all of it.

The Hill and the Stone of Divisions

The archaeology comes first, because it is the most certain. Uisneach is not a single monument but a complex — some two square kilometers carrying around forty features, of which roughly twenty are visible above ground and as many again traced beneath it, ranging in date from the Neolithic through the early Middle Ages. There are barrows and ring-barrows, enclosures, the remains of roads, a holy well, the hollow of a small lake. People used this hill, and marked it, for thousands of years.

The largest excavated structure sits near the summit: a great figure-of-eight earthwork, two conjoined ringforts, known as Rathnew. It was dug by R.A.S. Macalister and R. Lloyd Praeger in a campaign through the 1920s, their report published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1928. Macalister, never shy of a legend, took the larger enclosure for the palace of the half-legendary king Tuathal Techtmar. What the trenches actually produced was the apparatus of habitation and assembly: houses, walls, doorways and guard-chambers, two souterrains — underground stone passages for storage and refuge — burials, postholes, and heaps of ash. Among the more striking finds were pits holding partly burnt animal bones, each sealed under a large flat stone, and a bed of ash containing thoroughly charred animal skeletons. The excavators read these as the remains of fires kindled and then suddenly quenched, with animal offerings consumed in them. Feasting on a great scale, the lighting of large fires, very possibly the killing of beasts as part of the rite — this is the material residue of a gathering-place, and it is consistent with everything the texts go on to claim.

The “Stone of the Divisions” (Ail na Míreann) at Uisneach, from the travel book Romantic Ireland (1905). Internet Archive Book Images / Boston College Libraries; public domain.

On the southwest flank of the hill stands the stone around which all the meanings cluster. It is a limestone glacial erratic, a boulder dragged here and dropped by retreating ice, almost six meters tall and weighing better than thirty tons — a mass that would have caught the eye of the first people ever to walk this ground. Deep fissures split it, dividing the whole into uneven parts, and from those divisions it takes its Irish name: Ail na Míreann, the Stone of the Divisions. In English it is the Catstone, for from certain angles it sits like a crouching cat. In prehistory someone cut an earthen bank around it, setting it apart from the ordinary slope as a thing to be regarded. Medieval hagiography, reaching to claim the site for Christianity, called it Ail Coithrigi — most likely the Stone of Patrick.

What the divisions in the stone were taken to mean is the heart of the matter. The four provinces of old Ireland — Connacht in the west, Ulster in the north, Leinster in the east, Munster in the south — were said to meet here at their corners, and at their meeting lay the central fifth province, Mide, “the middle,” from which the modern county of Meath takes its name. The Catstone was the single point at which the five came together: the place where the country was at once divided and joined. From this the stone was named the navel of Ireland, its omphalos, the fixed center about which the whole island was arranged.

The Navel and the Fire

Within the frame of the tradition, the center is never merely geometric. It is the place where the land is fastened to what lies behind the land. The Stone of Divisions is the navel in the full sense the old cosmologies gave that word — the point at which the world is tied off, where Ireland joins to its own beginning. Here the mundus of the island and the country of the Otherworld touch, and from this touching, creation is held to flow. To stand at the navel is to stand where Ireland is made.

This is the logic that pairs Uisneach with Tara, thirty miles to the east. The two hills are the twin poles of the sacred geography of early Ireland, and the tradition keeps their offices distinct. Tara is the seat of the king — Teamhair na Rí, Tara of the Kings — the place of sovereignty, where the rightful ruler was made. Uisneach is the place of assembly: the mórdáil Uisnig, the Great Meeting of Uisneach, where, in the later accounts, the provinces and the druids came together. One hill held the one king; the other held the gathering of all. Kingship at Tara, convocation and the priesthood at Uisneach — the division of the two is itself a way of saying what each place was for.

The gathering at Uisneach was tied to a season and a fire. The festival was Bealtaine, the first of May — the cross-quarter day midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, the start of the bright half of the year, when the cattle were turned out from winter quarters onto the summer grass. The early-tenth-century glossary Sanas Cormaic preserves the rite: the druids, it records, would light two fires “with great incantations” and drive the cattle between them, against the plagues, every year. The medieval tale Tochmarc Emire gives the same account. The passage between the two flames was a passage of purification — beast and, in some tellings, herder driven through the smoke to be cleansed before the open season of the pastures. The historical record is firm on this much: that Bealtaine was a fire-festival of the turning year, its fires understood to protect and to cleanse.

Onto that seasonal rite the placename-lore — the dindshenchas, the systematic medieval verse and prose on the meanings of places — fixed a founding event, and fixed it here. The dindshenchas of Mide tells that the druid Mide, eponym of the central province, kindled a fire on Uisneach, and that the fire blazed for seven years. From it, in the wider tradition that grows around the text, the hearth-fire of every chief in Ireland was lit — and at Bealtaine, when the fires of the land were doused, the new flame went out from Uisneach across the country, kindled hill from hill until the whole island carried a single eye of fire. There is a darker half to the Mide story. When the other druids of Ireland objected to his keeping the fire, he summoned them into one house on the hill and cut out their tongues, which he buried in the ground beneath him; and sitting uas — “above” — them, he gave the hill, in this reckoning, its very name. The lore makes the center of Ireland the place where speech itself was put into the earth, the oral knowledge of the druids buried in the chthonic dark of the island’s navel.

It must be said plainly where this comes from. The dindshenchas, the Sanas Cormaic, the prose tales — these are the work of Christian, Irish, literate hands, monks and learned men writing from the ninth century onward, centuries after the conversion of the island, looking back at a pre-Christian world they did not inhabit and did not entirely approve of. The seven-year fire and the buried tongues are not a transcript of pagan ritual; they are medieval literary etymology, a story built to explain a name and a custom whose origins the writers themselves no longer held. What can be said with confidence is narrower and still considerable: that Bealtaine was an ancient fire-festival of early summer; that Uisneach was a great assembly-site where large fires were lit; and that the medieval imagination chose this hill, above all others, as the place where the first fire of Ireland was struck. The fire on the ground is attested by the ash in Macalister’s trenches. The first fire of all is the gift of the dindshenchas.

The Hill of Uisneach, long held to be the sacred center of the island. Photo by Abi Skipp, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The Gods Beneath the Hill

The myth does not stop at the fire. Uisneach is, in the old reckoning, a place of burials — not of mortals but of the gods. The hill is named in the tradition as the resting-place of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine race who held Ireland before the coming of the sons of Míl, and among those said to lie here are the greatest of them: Lugh of the many skills, the bright, many-gifted god, and the Dagda, the great father with his club and his cauldron. To bury Lugh at the navel of Ireland is no small placement. He is the god whose festival, Lughnasadh, opens the harvest at the other end of summer; to set his grave at the center is to bind the bright god into the fixed point of the land.

The hill carries a goddess as well, and she is the most consequential of all, for she is Ireland herself. In the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the medieval “Book of the Taking of Ireland” that arranges the island’s mythical history into a chronicle, the invading Milesians — the Gaels, the last race to take Ireland — meet upon Uisneach the goddess Ériu, from whom the island is named Éire. She greets them, and grants them the land, on the condition that her name be borne by it forever. And she is said to lie buried beneath the Stone of Divisions itself. The navel of Ireland is the grave of the woman who is Ireland — the sovereignty of the land made flesh, laid under the stone at its center.

On the hill the tradition also set a bile, a sacred tree, the Bile Uisnig, one of the great trees that stood at the cult-centers of early Ireland; and a holy well; and the ceremonial enclosure where the assembly met. Read as a whole, within its own frame, Uisneach is a complete sacred cosmos in miniature: the center-stone that is the navel and the grave of the land-goddess, the tree that joins the worlds, the fire that goes out across the island, the buried gods, and the gathering of the living provinces around all of it. Whether the people of Iron Age Ireland — whom we have learned, with the rise of Celtoskeptic scholarship, to call “Celtic” only with care, for it is far from clear that the islanders named themselves so — held this exact theology, no one can now recover. The cosmos at Uisneach is one the medieval texts assemble. But they assembled it around a real hill that real fires really burned upon, and the choice of this hill for the navel was not arbitrary. The land itself, with its central place and its great fissured stone, proposed the meaning, and the lore took it up.

The Quenched Fire and Its Relighting

With the conversion of Ireland the public fires of Uisneach went out. The hill kept its memory, but the mórdáil ceased; the assembly of the provinces dissolved into the smaller jurisdictions of a Christianized island. The site passed into the keeping of farmers, and for most of a thousand years the navel of Ireland was a hillside of sheep and cattle, its great stone a curiosity in a field, its summit a place for antiquaries and the occasional excavator. Macalister’s trenches of the 1920s opened the ground; later survey, using the eye of geophysics, traced the buried half of the monument-field that the surface no longer shows. The hill became a subject of study — and study has tended, over the past century, to revise Macalister’s confident “palace” into something both older and stranger: a cult-center and assembly-place whose use reached back into prehistory, royal residence being only its later and lesser phase.

And then, in the modern revival of a sacred Irish landscape, the fire was lit again. From 2009 a Bealtaine fire-festival returned to Uisneach, kindled on the summit each May with the cooperation of the landowning Clarke family, on whose working farm the hill largely sits and one of whom holds the office, half-ceremonial and half-genuine, of Keeper of the Hill. The new fires draw thousands up the slope after dark to watch the flame take on the navel of Ireland. In 2017 the Bealtaine fire was lit by Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland — the first Irish head of state, it was noted, to kindle the fire of Uisneach since the high kings. The image the modern festival reaches for is the old one: the single flame on the central hill, the country gathered to it, the fires of the land lit from one fire.

The Bealtaine fire on Uisneach during the 2022 Festival of the Fires. Photo by LookLookNoHands, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

This last is reception, and should be named as such. The contemporary festival is a deliberate modern reconstruction, drawing on the medieval texts and on the broader Celtic Revival and Neo-Pagan reimagining of Ireland’s pre-Christian world; it is not an unbroken survival of the mórdáil Uisnig. But it is not a fabrication either. It relights a fire on the same ground, at the same turn of the year, that the dindshenchas assigned to the first fire of all — and in doing so it performs, knowingly, the oldest claim the hill has ever made about itself. The navel of Ireland was always the place where the country was supposed to be able to see its own center, and gather to it, and carry one flame outward from it. On a dark night at the beginning of May, with the fire burning on the summit and the plain falling away unlit on every side, the claim is once again, briefly, true.

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