Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

  You come in through the site entrance into a graveyard that's still in active use - centuries-old cross-slabs standing shoulder to shoulder with modern headstones - and the first thing that stops you is Muiredach's Cross, reckoned by most to be the finest high cross in Ireland. Walk its east face and you're looking at Old Testament scenes (Adam and Eve, David and Goliath among them); round to the west face and it switches to the New Testament, the Crucifixion and a Last Judgement, the whole thing carved - so the theory goes - by the same mason responsible for the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnoise, with a pair of cats playing at the base of the shaft for good measure. It's named for Muiredach, an abbot who died in the early 920s (923 or 924, depending which source you trust), and a scaled reproduction of this exact cross stands in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Circle the South Church - its north side, then in through the door, then back out the west -...

Bective doesn't announce itself the way Tara does - you approach from the south-west across flat Boyne pastureland and the ruins seem almost modest, until you're inside them. This was Ireland's second Cistercian abbey, founded in 1147 by Murchad Ó Máel Sheachlainn, King of Meath, as a daughter house of Mellifont and, as it turned out, the only Cistercian house Meath ever got - its formal name, Abbatia de Beatitudine, translates roughly as the Abbey of Bliss. Work your way round the south-east and south-west corners and you're tracing the outer wall of what was once a much bigger complex; the site of the west range, where the lay brothers would have lived and worked, is now just a footprint in the grass, its buildings long gone. The cloister is the reason people come: rebuilt in the 15th century in Ardbraccan limestone, its arcade of gothic arches is carved with a small portrait of Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian order's founding voice, tucked into one of the pi...

Stand on top of Tara and you're standing on the spot Irish tradition insists was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland - though don't come expecting a castle; what you're walking over is a scatter of grassy earthworks that ask a bit of imagination of you. Start where this video does, at the Banqueting Hall (Teach Miodhchuarta), not really a hall at all but a long, parallel-banked avenue at the northern end of the hill, thought to be one of the last things ever built here. Head down past the Sloping Trenches (Claonfhearta) and Rath Chaelchon, a huddle of Bronze Age burial mounds ringed with ditches on the hill's northwestern slope, then on past the Rath of the Synods - once a multi-ringed enclosure that turned up Roman trinkets when excavated, and which was badly torn up in the early 1900s by treasure hunters convinced the Ark of the Covenant was buried underneath. The big grassy ring at the centre of it all is Rath Righ, the Enclosure of the Kings, roughly a kilometre r...

Swing your view around this 360 shot and you're standing on Bocan Hill above Culdaff, Inishowen, in the middle of what was once a formidable ring of standing stones - somewhere around thirty of them, if the early antiquarians are to be believed, though only seven still stand today, the rest toppled or broken by time, farming, or both. Look for the pair of tall entrance stones on the northwest side, still reaching close to two metres, and you'll get a sense of how imposing this circle - some 18-20 metres across, depending on whose tape measure you trust - must have been when whole. An 1816 report tells us diggers found graves and earthen urns tucked inside the ring, which is about as close as we get to knowing why it was built at all; officially it's filed under Bronze Age with a Neolithic whisper, and unofficially it's been dubbed a "sun temple," its axis reputedly lined up east-west towards Slieve Snaght and, on a clear day, all the way to Jura in Scotland. W...