The Hill of Tara doesn’t look like much when you first see it. There are no crumbling towers, no dramatic ruins – just a low green hill rising above the Meath countryside, with a few earthworks and mounds that take some squinting to make sense of. But Tara is one of those places where the weight of what happened here is felt rather than seen, and visitors consistently report something they struggle to put into words.

This was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland for centuries – a ceremonial and political centre that drew the roads of the ancient world towards it like spokes to a wheel. It has been significant since the Neolithic period, and by the time of the Iron Age it had become something else entirely: a threshold, a place where the boundary between this world and the next was understood to be at its thinnest. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the mythological divine race of pre-Christian Ireland, were said to have retreated beneath these hills when they were defeated by the Milesians – and to remain there still, in the Otherworld that runs parallel to ours just beneath the surface.

The most famous object on the hill is the Lia Fáil – the Stone of Destiny – a granite pillar that stands on the King’s Seat and was used in the inauguration of the High Kings. According to tradition, the stone would emit a roar when the rightful king of Ireland touched it. It is, arguably, the oldest paranormal account in Irish history – a stone that screamed.

Two hawthorn trees on the hill are said to belong to the fairies. This is not a casual claim. In Irish tradition, lone hawthorns at sacred sites are understood to be fairy territory, and interfering with them – taking a clipping, breaking a branch, damaging the bark in any way – is considered an invitation to serious misfortune. The belief is strong enough that farmers across Ireland will work around lone hawthorns rather than remove them, and road plans have been rerouted to avoid disturbing them.

The Tara trees are visited regularly by people who leave tokens – ribbons, coins, small personal objects – as offerings. One of the two trees has already fallen, damaged not by anyone wishing it harm but by the sheer weight of the tokens left upon it over the years. The second is said to be under similar pressure.

The hill is open to visitors and free to enter.