navan fort

Navan Fort is, perhaps, the most venerable ancient monument in Northern Ireland. It can be identified with virtual certainty as Emain Macha, the seat of the ancient kings of Ulster, and called after a princess or goddess Macha. It was the centre associated with King Conchobor mac Nessa and his Red Branch Knights who gave their name to the neighbouring townlands of Creeveroe (craobh Ruadh in Irish), and it was here that the great Irish mythical hero Cu Chulainn spent much of his youth before going out single-handedly to face the army of the equally mythical Queen Maeve advancing from Connacht.

The low but commanding hill-top is surrounded by a bank with a ditch inside, suggesting that it was more a ceremonial than a defensive site. Excavations of the large mound at its centre, carried out between 1963 and 1971, showed that a ditched enclosure, some 150 meters in diameter, had been built in the Late Bronze Age. It was reoccupied in the Early Iron Age, when the first of a series of round houses with large annexes was built which, on plan, look like a figure of eight. The house was rebuilt a total of nine times on the same spot until, around 100 B.C., it was finally replaced by a huge (roofed) wooden structure consisting on 275 large upright posts arranged in five concentric rings, and with a very tall pole in the centre. This structure may never have been lived in, for it was soon filled with large limestone boulders and set on fire in what may have been one enormous ritual conflagration, after which it was covered over by sods to form the mound which was carefully rebuilt after the excavation was completed.

The creation of St. Patrick's church at Armagh two miles away was probably at least partially responsible for the abandonment of Navan Fort, though Brian Boru encamped here when he came to Armagh in 1005, and the old traditions associated with the site must have lasted into the later medieval period as Niall O'Neill chose it in 1387 as the location of a house which he built to entertain 'the learned companies of Ireland'. The threat of continuing quarrying close to the eastern side of the site was removed after a Public Inquiry in 1985, and the future of the site is now ensured.