Grianán of Aileach — hillfort
Gareth Wray · CC BY-SA 4.0

Grianán of Aileach

Grianan of Aileach

  • 2 min read
  • 55.017° N 7.433° W

Interesting facts

  • Ptolemy's second-century map of Ireland marks a royal site that many scholars identify with Aileach, suggesting the hilltop was important long before the stone fort.
  • Excavations in the 1870s turned up a sandstone gaming board chequered into 36 squares, alongside sling-stones, coins and beads.
  • The narrow entrance passage through the wall is about 4.6 metres long and just over a metre wide.
  • The longest passage hidden inside the wall runs for about 20 metres.
  • The name is often rendered as the Stone Palace of the Sunny View, combining ail, a rock or stone, with grianán, a sunny place.
  • Before its famous fall in 1101, the fort had already been destroyed in 674 by Fínsnechta Fledach and in 937 by Viking raiders.
  • A medieval poem in the Book of Lecan names two builders, Garbhan and Imcheall, and praises the fort as the finest in Ireland.
  • According to local tradition, the fort served as a hidden Mass rock for Catholic worship during the centuries of the penal laws.
  • Walter Bernard's restoration in the 1870s took about eight years, from 1870 to 1878.

Why it is worth it

The Grianán of Aileach sits on the top of Greenan Mountain, only 244 metres high but placed so that it commands the land between Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle, and on a clear day the view takes in parts of Donegal, Londonderry and Tyrone. The fort itself is a perfect ring of drystone: a wall roughly four and a half metres thick and five metres high encloses a grassy circle about 23 metres across. Inside, three terraces step up the face of the wall, linked by flights of stairs, so that you can walk right round the top of the rampart. Two narrow passages run within the thickness of the wall on either side of the lintelled entrance, stopping short for reasons no one has explained.

The stone fort is generally dated to the second half of the first millennium AD and stands inside much older earthworks: three low, heather-covered banks, now faint, encircle the hilltop, and there was once a tumulus and a covered spring dedicated to St Patrick below the summit. From the early Middle Ages the site was the royal seat of the northern Uí Néill, the kings of Ailech, and the place where they were inaugurated. The annals record its destruction several times, most famously in 1101, when Muirchertach Ua Briain, king of Munster, is said to have had it pulled down in revenge for the destruction of his own royal seat of Kincora. Irish legend gives the fort an even grander origin, crediting its building to the Dagda, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, as a tomb for his murdered son.

What you see today is partly a Victorian rebuilding. When the antiquarian George Petrie surveyed the site in the 1830s it was a ruin barely two metres high. In the 1870s Walter Bernard of Derry reconstructed it, marking with tar the courses of original masonry that survived under the rubble and building on them; the upper parts owe more to his reading of other Irish stone forts, notably Staigue in County Kerry, than to evidence from this hill. The name is usually translated along the lines of "the sunny stone place", and the grianán, a place with a view, describes it well: the hilltop is at its most striking late in the day, when the wall glows against the loughs below.

At the foot of the hill, on the main road, stands St Aengus's Church at Burt, designed by the architect Liam McCormick and completed in 1967; its circular plan and rising roof deliberately echo the fort above, and it is widely counted among the finest Irish churches of the 20th century. The Grianán is a National Monument and is free to visit.

Getting there

The fort is about 8 km from Derry, just across the border in County Donegal, and about 21 km from Letterkenny. The nearest airport is City of Derry Airport (LDY), roughly 18 km away; Donegal Airport (CFN) lies about 58 km off on the Republic's side. A narrow lane climbs from the Burt area to a small free car park near the summit, and a short path leads up to the fort.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Ireland 15The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Ireland 5The Most Remarkable Hillforts 11The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306

From the encyclopaedia

The Grianán of Aileach, sometimes anglicised as Greenan Ely or, locally, as Greenan Fort, is a hillfort atop the 244 metres (801 ft) high Greenan Mountain at Burt on the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal, Ireland. The main structure is a 19th-century reconstruction of a stone ringfort, thought to have been built by the Northern Uí Néill, in the sixth or seventh century CE; although there is evidence that the site had been in use before the fort was built. It has been identified as the seat of the Kingdom of Ailech and one of the royal sites of Gaelic Ireland. The wall is about 4.5 metres (15 ft) thick and 5 metres (16 ft) high. Inside it has three terraces, which are linked by steps, and two long passages within it. Originally, there would have been buildings inside the ringfort. Just outside it are the remains of a well and a tumulus.

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