Navan Fort (Emain Macha)

About Navan Fort

Navan Fort, in Irish Eamhain Mhacha (Emain Macha in older spelling), is the most important ceremonial site of the Iron Age in Ulster and one of the four "royal" sites of pre-Christian Ireland, alongside Tara, Cruachan and Dún Ailinne. It sits on a low hill two miles west of Armagh city, a roughly circular enclosure of about 18 acres marked by a bank and an internal ditch, with a grassy mound and a smaller ring barrow visible on the summit.

In the early Irish tradition this was the capital of the Ulaid, the kingdom from which Ulster takes its name, and the seat of Conchobar mac Nessa. The Ulster Cycle of stories is full of it — the boyhood deeds of Cú Chulainn, the kidnap of Deirdre, the comings and goings of the Red Branch warriors. By the 5th century, when Saint Patrick made nearby Armagh his ecclesiastical capital, Navan was already a ruin and a place of memory.

Excavation in the 1960s and 70s under Dudley Waterman found something that the stories had not prepared anyone for. Inside the circular bank, a huge timber structure had once stood — 40 metres in diameter, with concentric rings of oak posts arranged around a central post, the whole thing roofed. Dendrochronology dates the central post to 95 BC. Almost as soon as it was built the structure was filled with stones, set on fire and then covered over with the mound that remains today. Why is debated. What is certain is that the building was made to be destroyed.

Navan does not stand alone. The wider Navan complex includes Haughey's Fort, an earlier Bronze Age enclosure on a neighbouring hill, the King's Stables — an artificial Bronze Age pool that yielded a human skull and animal bones — and Loughnashade, the small lake to the east where four magnificent Iron Age bronze trumpets were dredged up in 1798. They are now in the National Museum of Ireland.

The mound itself is open and free. The visitor centre at the foot of the hill, the Navan Centre, runs interpretive exhibitions and (in season) costumed re-enactors of life around the Iron Age compound — iron-smithing, weaving, the kind of work the trumpets would have called the workers to.

Essential information

Getting there

A short drive west of Armagh on the Killylea Road. Free car park at the visitor centre. About 50 minutes by car from Belfast.

Underfoot

A short uphill walk on grass from the visitor centre to the mound. Boots in winter, trainers fine the rest of the year.

Read first

The mound is more powerful if you know the stories. Even a glance at the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or the Cú Chulainn pages of any Ulster Cycle anthology, will deepen what you're looking at.

Live interpretation

The visitor centre's reconstructed dwelling has costumed interpreters in season — check the website for days when it's running.

Dogs

Welcome on leads on the fort itself. Not in the visitor centre or reconstruction.

Refreshments

Café at the visitor centre. Wider choice ten minutes away in Armagh.