Brian Boru is said to have been buried at or very close to this spot on the outside wall of the north transept of St Patrick’s Cathedral (C of I), Armagh.
Born in County Clare around 941, Brian Boru claimed the High Kingship of Ireland in 1001, and although widely accepted within a year, continued to be rejected by the previously dominant northern O’Neill clan. As a result, he travelled to Armagh in 1005 to assert his authority and, according to tradition, laid twenty pieces of gold on St Patrick’s altar at this spot.
In 1014, he defended his high kingship at the Battle of Clontarf, now a district of Dublin, against a combined army of Vikings and rebellious Leinstermen. Although he won the battle and thus finally broke the power of Viking raiders in Ireland, he was murdered afterwards, reputedly as he prayed in a tent by the battlefield. His body was brought to Armagh, and buried here with great ceremony. He was both the greatest of the High Kings of Ireland and the last of the great ones.
St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Armagh (Irish: Ardeaglais Phádraig, Ard Mhacha) is the seat of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Diocese of Armagh. Although the origins of the site are as a 5th century Irish stone monastery, said to have been founded by St. Patrick, and there has been a significant church on the site since, its present appearance largely dates from Lewis Nockalls Cottingham’s restoration in the years after 1834, although the fabric of Primate O’Scanlan’s 1268 building remains. Over the centuries, the church on the site has been at least partially destroyed and rebuilt 17 times.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the cathedral was the seat of the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and one of the most important churches in Gaelic Ireland. With the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, the cathedral was taken over by the Church of Ireland.
Following Catholic emancipation in the 19th century, a new Catholic cathedral was built in Armagh, also called St Patrick’s Cathedral, on another hilltop half a kilometre away.
Evidence suggests that the hilltop was originally a pagan sanctuary.
By the 7th century, it had become the most important monastery and monastic school in the north of Ireland, and monastic settlement grew up around it. Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, visited Armagh in 1004, acknowledging it as the head cathedral of Ireland and bestowing it a large sum of gold. Brian was buried at Armagh cathedral after his death at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Armagh’s claim to the primacy of Ireland was formally acknowledged at the Synod of Ráth Breasail in 1111.
The cathedral was renovated and restored under Dean Eoghan McCawell (1505–1549), having suffered from a devastating fire in 1511 and being in poor shape. Soon after his death the cathedral was described by Lord Chancellor Cusack as “one of the fairest and best churches in Ireland”. However, by the end of the Nine Years’ War which devastated Ulster between 1593 and 1603, Armagh lay in ruins.
Following the Nine Years’ War, Armagh came under English control and the town began to be settled by Protestants from Britain, as part of the Plantation of Ulster. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, many Protestant settlers fled to Armagh cathedral for safety. After negotiations with the besieged settlers, Catholic rebels occupied the town until May 1642.
As mentioned above, the cathedral largely owes its current appearance to a rebuilding between 1834 and 1840 by Archbishop Lord John George Beresford and the architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham. The fabric remains that of the mediaeval building but much restored. While Cottingham was heavy-handed in his restoration, the researches of T. G. F. Patterson and Janet Myles in the late twentieth century have shown the restoration to have been notably antiquarian for its time. The tracery of the nave windows in particular are careful restorations as is the copy of the font. The capital decoration of the two westernmost pillars of the nave (either side of the West Door internal porch) are mediaeval as are the bulk of the external gargoyle carvings (some resited) of the parapet of the Eastern Arm. Cottingham’s intention of retaining the richly cusped West Door with flanking canopied niches was over-ruled. Subsequent restorations have more radically altered the internal proportions of the mediaeval building, proportions which Cottingham had retained.
Many other Celtic and mediaeval carvings are to be seen within the cathedral which is also rich in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sculpture. There are works by Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Louis-François Roubiliac, John Michael Rysbrack, Carlo Marochetti and others.
