Crom Cruach

In the dindsenchas — the medieval Irish lore explaining the names of places — Magh Slécht in County Cavan was remembered as the most feared religious site in pre-Christian Ireland: the 'Plain of Prostrations', where a great idol called Crom Cruach stood at the centre of a ring of twelve lesser stone figures. Crom Cruach is described as covered in gold, and the High Kings of Ireland, led by Tigernmas, are said to have travelled there on the eve of Samhain to bow down before it.

The tradition that grew up around Crom Cruach is unusually dark even by the standards of Irish myth: the dindsenchas poems claim that in return for milk and grain, the people of Ireland sacrificed a third of their children to the idol, prostrating themselves so violently in worship that — on one fateful Samhain — Tigernmas and three-quarters of his assembled host reportedly died at Magh Slécht in the act of adoration itself. Whether this reflects a real cult, a later Christian exaggeration meant to blacken pre-Christian religion, or some mixture of both, it made Crom Cruach the most notorious pagan idol named in Irish tradition.

According to later legend, it was Saint Patrick himself who ended the cult, striking the great idol with his crozier and shattering it, and toppling the twelve stones around it. In 1921, a broken, cone-shaped stone covered in spiralling Iron Age La Tène carvings was unearthed at Killycluggin, close to Magh Slécht, lying near the remains of a stone circle — and has since been widely proposed as the very stone the stories describe, a rare case of an early Irish legend pointing to a real archaeological find.