The Witch of Knocknashee

Knocknashee — Cnoc na Sí, 'Hill of the Fairies' — is a vast Bronze Age hillfort in the Ox Mountains of County Sligo, its flat summit traditionally said to be the dancing-ground where the Good People gathered every full moon.

Local tradition tells of an old witch who had once belonged to the fairies herself before being cast out, and who watched their gatherings with bitter hatred. To destroy them, she travelled to 'Pagan England' and gathered soil that she enchanted so that it would swell into a hill the moment it touched Irish ground. Carrying this soil home in a pack on her back, she planned to drop it on top of Knocknashee and crush the fairy mansion beneath it. But the fairies learned of her plan and asked their own wizard for help; he transformed himself into a black pig and, as the witch passed, leapt onto her pack and knocked it from her shoulder.

The spell still worked — the spilled clay swelled into a new hill on the spot — but not where the witch intended. Seeing what had happened and spotting the pig, she cried out 'Muc Allta!' ('wild pig'), and the new hill took that name, softened over time into Muckalty. The story survives in the Dúchas Schools' Collection alongside other Knocknashee fairy traditions, and the hillfort itself remains one of Ireland's largest Bronze Age monuments.