Map Key — Numbered Sites
| ① | Rathcroghan Co. Roscommon | Royal seat of Connacht and Europe's most significant Celtic royal site, containing 60 ancient national monuments. Queen Medb's capital. Home of Oweynagat — the Cave of the Cats — the Celtic gateway to the Otherworld and the mythological birthplace of Samhain. Western terminus of the Slighe Assail. |
| ② | River Shannon Ford Longford / Roscommon border | Ancient crossing point of the Shannon. Entering Co. Longford from Connacht, this was a natural one-day stopping place for travellers on the Slighe Assail — approximately a day's walk west of Cnoc Na Rí. |
| ③ | Corlea Trackway Co. Longford | Iron Age oak togher built in 148 BC — the largest of its kind ever uncovered in Europe. Constructed from split oak planks to carry the ceremonial highway across impassable bog. Archaeological excavations here uncovered 108 toghers in the surrounding bog, with the earliest human activity on this land dated to approximately 4,000 BCE — the Neolithic era. |
| ④ | Cnoc Na Rí N39 A306 · Keenagh, Co. Longford | Art, Wellness & Spiritual Centre. Elevated dry ground on the ancient ceremonial corridor. A natural stopping place for those travelling the Slighe Assail for six thousand years. The placename — Hill of the King — carries the landscape memory of this sacred ground. cnocnari.com |
| ⑤ | Hill of Uisneach Co. Westmeath | The ritual navel of Ireland — the cosmological centre where the five provinces met. Sacred Druidic Bealtaine fire site. Home of the Dagda and the Tuatha Dé Danann. The Bóthar Naofa — Sacred Road — runs through here, described in mythology as a resting place of the Sidhe during their solstice journeys across Ireland. |
| ⑥ | Lough Owel Co. Westmeath | Ancient waypoint on the Slighe Assail, specifically named in historical sources as a landmark on the great road's route from Tara westward toward Rathcroghan. |
| ⑦ | Loughcrew Cairns Slieve na Caillí · Co. Meath | Neolithic passage tombs, 3,300 BC — among the oldest in Ireland. Slieve na Caillí: Mountain of the Hag. Solar alignment at spring and autumn equinox. Part of the sacred chain linking Uisneach, Tara and Brú na Bóinne. From these hilltops, panoramic views reach seventeen counties. |
| ⑧ | Hill of Tara Co. Meath | Seat of the High Kings of Ireland and eastern terminus of the Slighe Assail. Home of the Lia Fáil — the Stone of Destiny, brought to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danann. All five great roads of Ireland converge here. Active from the Neolithic period through the Iron Age as Ireland's spiritual and political centre. |
| ⑨ | Fourknocks Co. Meath | Neolithic passage tomb and ritual enclosure lying in the sacred Meath corridor between the Hill of Tara and Brú na Bóinne, part of the wider Neolithic ceremonial landscape of the Boyne Valley. |
| ⑩ | Brú na Bóinne Newgrange · Knowth · Dowth · Co. Meath | UNESCO World Heritage Site. Neolithic, built c. 3,200 BC — predating the Pyramids of Giza by 400 years and Stonehenge by 500–700 years. Newgrange's passage chamber is precisely aligned to the winter solstice sunrise. Contains the largest collection of megalithic art in Western Europe. The ancestral landscape of Cnoc Na Rí's founder, who grew up in the Boyne Valley when Newgrange was simply the landscape of childhood — the great mound always present on the horizon. |
Six Thousand Years of Sacred Ground
The land on which Cnoc Na Rí stands has been in continuous human use since at least 4,000 BCE. For six thousand years — through Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and beyond — people moved through this corridor, stopped on this elevated ground above the bog, and carried their ceremonies, healings, and journeys between the great sacred centres of Ireland. The Slighe Assail was not just a road. It was a living thread connecting the sovereignty goddess at Rathcroghan to the Druidic fire at Uisneach, to the ancestral tombs of Loughcrew, to the High Kings at Tara, to the solstice mysteries of Newgrange.
The founder of Cnoc Na Rí grew up in the Boyne Valley, in daily eyeline of Newgrange, before visitor centres and UNESCO designation — when Brú na Bóinne was simply the landscape of childhood. The move west to Keenagh was, unknowingly, a movement along the same ancient sacred axis: from the eastern anchor of the Neolithic world to the living heart of the ceremonial midlands. The name Cnoc Na Rí — Hill of the King — carries the landscape memory of ground that has held ceremony long before any house was built upon it.