Archaeology 360: Hill of Slane Friary, Co. Meath


Approach from the east and Slane's hill looks unassuming for somewhere with this much claimed for it - it's the spot where, in AD 433, St Patrick is said to have lit the first Paschal fire in Ireland, in deliberate defiance of the High King's ban on rival fires while the court at Tara held its own festival some ten kilometres away (the two hills, conveniently for the story, can see each other). Patrick supposedly impressed the king enough to be let carry on preaching, and put one of the king's own men, Erc, in charge here as bishop - Erc founded a monastery on the hill in the 6th century and is said to be buried in the graveyard under two gable-shaped stones known as the Bishop's Tomb. Standing between the ruins of the Franciscan College and St Patrick's Church, you're on ground that's seen most of it: a round tower here was burned by Vikings in 948, a motte and bailey went up in the 1170s (its builder, Richard Fleming, killed along with more than a hundred of his men within the year), and what you're actually walking through today is a Franciscan college founded, or possibly rebuilt, in 1512 by Sir Christopher Fleming - just four priests, four lay brothers and four choristers, arranged round an open quadrangle, with Tudor roses and the English royal coat of arms carved into the stonework as reminders of who was paying for it. It didn't last: dissolved under Henry VIII around 1540, briefly reoccupied later, and abandoned for good in 1723. St Patrick's Church next door, walked round on all sides - east, south, west - is the younger of the two ruins, a 16th-century parish church with a tall gothic tower and a handsome three-light mullioned window that's survived in far better shape than almost anything else on the hill. Somewhere beneath all of it, tradition holds, lies the grave of Sláine, a prehistoric Fir Bolg king the hill is supposedly named after - which, if nothing else, means this small patch of grass has been claimed by kings, bishops, Vikings, and saints, in more or less that order.

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References

Wikipedia contributors, 'Hill of Slane', Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

'Hill of Slane', Heritage Ireland

'The Friary on The Hill of Slane', Curious Ireland

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