Two miles west of Armagh, on a low hill above pasture and hedgerow, sits the great earthen ring of Navan Fort, in Irish Eamhain Mhacha. This was the royal capital of the Ulaid, the ancient kings of Ulster who give their name to the province. It was named for Macha, the same goddess as the city itself, and it features prominently in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology, particularly the Cattle Raid of Cooley. Excavations have shown the site was used ceremonially for at least 800 years before the Christian era, and at one point a huge wooden structure was deliberately built, burned, and then buried under a stone cairn. Why? Nobody really knows. The Ulaid eventually lost their grip on the area in the fourth century, displaced by the Three Collas, but the place remained sacred long after the political power had moved on.

On the north side of Saint Patrick's Church of Ireland Cathedral, set into the exterior wall, is a stone plaque marking the burial place of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland. Brian had fought his greatest battle at Clontarf, outside Dublin, on Good Friday 1014, and won. He died in the moment of victory, killed in his tent by retreating Vikings. The Annals of Ulster record that his body was carried north to Armagh and buried with full rites in the cathedral churchyard. He had granted his sanction to the Law of Saint Patrick in 1006, the right of the Armagh primates to collect tribute throughout Ireland; the record is preserved in the Book of Armagh in the handwriting of Brian's own chaplain. The book itself, a 9th-century illuminated manuscript containing accounts of Patrick's life, his Confessio, and a complete New Testament, is now held at Trinity College Dublin.

By the eighth century, Armagh was the principal monastic school in Ireland, said at its peak to have housed as many as seven thousand students. The Irish annals also record at least seventeen burnings of the city, partial or total, often by Viking raiders and later by Anglo-Norman invaders. William Fitz-Aldelm carried away Saint Patrick's crosier, the Staff of Jesus, during one such raid in the 12th century. And yet the school persisted, the cathedral was rebuilt again and again, and the Archbishop of Armagh remained the highest-ranking churchman in Ireland. The Synod of Kells in 1152 formally confirmed Armagh as one of four metropolitan sees of the Irish church, with Dublin, Cashel, and Tuam as its peers.

Of all the archbishops who have held the see, none is more remembered than Saint Oliver Plunkett, primate from 1669 to 1681. Plunkett spent his episcopate trying to rebuild a Catholic church battered by penal laws, then fell foul of the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Popish Plot. Arrested on a charge of conspiring to bring 20,000 French troops into Ireland, he was first tried in Dundalk where a jury of Protestants refused to convict him. The venue was moved to London where he was tried without his witnesses present, found guilty, and dragged on a sledge to Tyburn on 1 July 1681. He was the last Catholic martyr executed in England. His head, preserved in remarkable condition, can still be viewed at Saint Peter's church in Drogheda. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1975.

Most of what you see when you walk through Armagh today is the work of one man and one century. Archbishop Richard Robinson, primate from 1765 to 1794, spent his enormous personal fortune turning what was then a shabby provincial town into one of the finest small Georgian cities in Ireland. The result is The Mall, a long, tree-lined oval green; rows of elegant townhouses in pale local limestone and pink sandstone; the Armagh Public Library on Abbey Street (founded 1771) which still holds Jonathan Swift's own annotated copy of the first edition of Gulliver's Travels; and the Armagh Observatory, founded in 1790. On 22 July 2021, the Observatory's weather station recorded 31.4°C, the highest air temperature ever measured in Northern Ireland.

Stand in the centre of Armagh and look in any direction and you will see one of two spires. The Church of Ireland's medieval Cathedral of Saint Patrick crowns the original hill of Ard Mhacha; the Catholic Cathedral of Saint Patrick stands on a neighbouring rise, twin spires reaching higher into the sky. Both are still active churches. Both archbishops still claim the primacy. The current Catholic primate is Eamon Martin, in office since 2014. The current Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop John McDowell, has been in office since 2020. They are friends, by all accounts. They preside over a small grey-stone city whose population has barely passed sixteen thousand, but which has been at the centre of Irish religious life for sixteen hundred years. Macha's height has not moved. The view from it just keeps getting older.