The Last King of Ireland
What happened to the coronation stone of the O’Neills?
If you wish to see Tullyhogue Fort, be ready for a bit of a climb. From the parking lot, you follow a snaking path, marked by briskly modern printed signs, to the base of a round hill, ringed by graceful, swaying trees. It makes your heart pound to clamber up the side of that hill; schoolchildren scramble up it, led there by teachers keen to give a lesson about a chapter from the island’s distant past. Those are the most frequent visitors to Tullyhogue, the children.
For an outsider, an American, learning about it and finding out details requires persistence. Helen Allen, who capably manages media inquiries for the Department of Communities branch of the Northern Ireland government, provided help and a bit of advice: “There are multiple spellings of the site name, so you may need to use the versions ‘Tullaghoge,’ ‘Tullaghogue,’ ‘Tullyhoge,’ ‘Tullyhogue,’ and ‘Tullac óg,’ and there may be further variations too.” No matter the variations, I’ve learned the word is Middle Gaelic, a language spoken from roughly 900 A.D. to 1200 A.D., and it means something along the lines of “the Hill of the Young Warriors.”
The hill is in County Tyrone, near the picturesque city of Cookstown and forty-five miles west of Belfast. Once you’ve reached the top of Tullyhogue, there is no “fort.” There probably never was…
