The Hill of Tara

The seat of the High Kings, and the stone that roared

Tradition names this low hill in County Meath as the seat of the High Kings of Ireland, and on its summit stands the standing stone believed to be the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, which was said to roar when the rightful king touched it. The monuments run from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. The oldest, the Mound of the Hostages, is a passage tomb of about 3200 BC that took almost 300 burials in a single century, and its passage lines up with the sunrise around the old festivals of Samhain and Imbolc. A double timber circle 250 metres across once ringed it. Iron Age banks enclose the Rath of the Kings, a thousand metres round, and its ditch held human burials and a high concentration of horse and dog bones. The strangest dig here was a modern one: early in the 20th century British Israelites, convinced the Ark of the Covenant lay under Tara, badly mutilated the Rath of the Synods looking for it. The hill is a national monument in the care of the Office of Public Works.