Knocknarea and Queen Medb’s Cairn

Before the grey Atlantic throws itself on the strand at Sligo, a short green mountain rises—Knocknarea, a table set for the sky. On its crown is a cairn of stones, and in every house from Strandhill to the Garavogue someone can tell you whose it is.

“Medb,” they say, and if they are old they say it as if it tasted of apples and iron.

Medb of Cruachan, queen of Connacht, whose will was as steady as winter. She chose her own bride-price and led armies where kings feared the mud. She was not a woman to be contained by door or treaty. And when talk turned to where a queen should lie when her long day ended, Medb listened and then made a choice.

“I will take the high place,” she said, “to look east on Ulster, to look west on the sea, and to feel the wind wash my bones clean of the dust of courts.”

Men spoke of sacred barrows and old taboos; poets muttered of omens like sparrows in the rafters. Medb waved them quiet. “Bring stones,” she said. “One from each field, one from each hearth, one from each hand that has eaten bread in my peace and fought in my anger.”

So they came—farmers with boulders on their backs, children with cobbles, smiths with rocks black as bread crust, and warriors with slabs scratched by ogham knives. They climbed the mountain in a line that looked, from far away, like a ant-trail of loyalty.

Medb watched from her chariot, her hair braided like a red river. A west wind caught the tails of her horses and made them look like banners.

At the top, a circle was laid. In the center, they set a pillar-stone that had once marked a boundary between two stubborn brothers. Medb laughed at that and touched it with her palm. “Here’s a boundary to end all bickering,” she said. “Life below, memory above.”

Some say she stood barefoot on the stones and sang a battle-march so soft it turned into a lullaby; others say she said nothing at all, which would be stranger still. But all agree that when the cairn rose higher than a man’s shoulder, the wind took a different sound around it—as if pleased.

“Bury me upright,” Medb told her captains, “facing the enemy.” Whether they obeyed is a matter for poets and archaeologists. The cairn is closed and keeps its manners. Yet the mountain knows her weight; the grass holds the shape of a queen.

On bright days the cairn throws a short shadow like a crown. On mist days it is a whale-back under a grey sea of air. Children leave small stones at its base and wish to be brave; lovers circle it sunwise and wish to be true. The people of Sligo watch their weather sweep in from the Atlantic across Medb’s chosen height and remember that pride is not always arrogance; sometimes it is simply knowing where you belong.

If you climb Knocknarea when the fuchsia burns along the hedges and the gorse smells of coconut, you can look east to Benbulben’s table and west to the horizon’s silver knife, and you might feel what Medb felt—a queen’s view, stern and fair, over a land that is always remaking its stories.