Hill of Tara

In legends and in the popular imagination, the "seat of the High Kings of Ireland" has taken on mythic proportions. As with much of the Celtic past, it was the 19th-century revival led by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory that was responsible for the near-religious veneration of this site, set at the junction of the five ancient roads of Ireland. Today, its ancestral banqueting hall and great buildings (one was the former palace of the Ard Rí, or High King) have vanished except for a few columns. Still, the site is awe-inspiring.