Navan Fort
A Barbary ape's skull, a 40-metre timber hall filled with stones and set alight, and a legendary queen's curse: Navan Fort is Ulster's strangest hill.
Published
Quick Facts
- Location
- Near Armagh, County Armagh, Northern Ireland
- Also known as
- Emain Macha (Eamhain Mhacha)
- Type
- Iron Age ceremonial enclosure and mound on a drumlin hill
- Great timber building
- Tree-ring dated to 95 BC
- Size of the building
- About 40 metres across, ringed by concentric rows of posts
- Enclosure
- Roughly 250 metres across, with the ditch inside the bank
- Legendary role
- Capital of the Ulaid and home of King Conchobar mac Nessa
- Excavated
- 1960s and 1970s, led by Dudley Waterman
The hill that held a monkey
Among the finds from Navan Fort was the skull of a Barbary ape, a species from North Africa, turning up on an Irish hilltop around two thousand years ago. Nobody knows how it got here. A gift, a trade, or a living curiosity paraded before a chieftain's court are all possible. Whatever the route, it tells us that this grassy hump outside Armagh was no backwater. Its rulers had connections reaching across Europe and the Mediterranean. The skull is one of the best reasons the site is called a royal centre rather than just a big earthwork.
Build a hall, fill it with stone, burn it
The most startling discovery came from archaeologists digging in the 1960s and 1970s. At the summit stood a vast circular timber structure about 40 metres across, with rings of posts around a huge central oak trunk. Tree-ring dating put the felling of that central post in 95 BC. Yet the building seems to have stood only briefly. It was packed with a cairn of limestone blocks, then set on fire, and finally sealed beneath a mound of turf. It was not a house and not a fort. It was a deliberate act, built to be destroyed. Whoever ordered it was making a statement we can only guess at, probably ritual or political, perhaps both.
A ditch on the wrong side
Look at the big oval enclosure around the hill and something is odd. The ditch runs inside the bank, the reverse of a defensive fort, where the ditch would be outside to stop attackers. That layout points to a place for gatherings and ceremony, a space where the bank held people in rather than kept them out. Despite its name, Navan Fort was never really a fort. The earthworks cover roughly 250 metres, and walking the ring gives a good feel for the scale of the gathering place.
Macha's curse and the legend of Emain
In the stories of the Ulster Cycle, Emain Macha was the capital of the Ulaid, home to King Conchobar mac Nessa and his Red Branch warriors. The young Cú Chulainn, who famously defended Ulster alone in the Táin, belongs to this world. The name has more than one explanation. In the best-known tale, a woman named Macha was forced by the king to race his horses while heavily pregnant. She won, then gave birth to twins at the finish, and the word emain is said to mean twins. In her agony she cursed the men of Ulster to suffer labour-like pangs in their hour of greatest need, for nine generations. Another story has a red-haired queen, Macha Mong Ruad, marking out the fort with the pin of her brooch. Either way, the nearby city's name, Armagh, comes from Ard Mhacha, "Macha's height".
Not just one age, and not just one hill
Navan's story goes far back before the famous building. Nearby Haughey's Fort, a Bronze Age hillfort from around 1100 BC, shows that this landscape was a centre of power long before the Iron Age. A short walk away, Loughnashade lake gave up Iron Age bronze horns in 1798, instruments of a sort that suggest ceremony or war calls. Offerings were evidently being made into the water as well as on the hill. The pattern, with hill, lake and older fort, suggests a sacred and political landscape used for centuries.
What to look for on the hill
The site is a low, rounded drumlin with a large circular mound on top, and it rewards a slow walk. Climb to the summit and you can trace the outer bank and look across the Armagh countryside, with the cathedral spires of the city on the skyline. Grazing sheep often keep the grass short, which makes the outline of the bank and ditch easier to read. Look for the shape of the great mound and imagine the timber hall beneath it. The nearby interpretive centre helps connect the digs, the legends and the Iron Age finds, so the hill makes sense before you set foot on it.
Notable people
- Dudley Waterman
- Conchobar mac Nessa
- Cú Chulainn
- Macha