It is the smallest county in Northern Ireland and the smallest in Ulster, just 1,327 square kilometres of orchards, drumlins, and granite uplands wedged between Lough Neagh and the southern border. But on 22 July 2021, an observation post at the Armagh Observatory recorded 31.4°C, the highest air temperature ever measured in Northern Ireland. Armagh tends to record things this way: hotter, older, more contested than its size suggests. The county is named for the goddess Macha, said to be buried on a wooded hill near where the city of Armagh now stands, and it has been called the Orchard County for so long that nobody quite knows when the nickname stuck. In May the apple blossom in the lower fields can stretch unbroken for miles.
The name comes straight from Irish mythology. Macha was a sovereignty goddess of the Ulaid, the prehistoric kings of Ulster, and according to The Book of the Taking of Ireland she was buried on a hill that became known as Ard Macha, Macha's height. Two miles west of the modern city, on a circular hill ringed with grass earthworks, lies Emain Macha (Navan Fort), the ceremonial capital of the Ulaid before the fourth century. Excavations have shown that the site was deliberately ritualised: a vast wooden hall was built around 95 BC, ceremonially burned within months of completion, and buried under a stone cairn. The Ulaid were displaced by the Three Collas in the fourth century, but the place remained sacred. By the year 445, Saint Patrick had built his first stone church on the same hill where the goddess was supposed to lie.
Drive south from the lakeshore and the land rises. The northern third of the county is flat orchard country, the apple-growing heart of Ulster, sloping gently down to Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the British Isles. The middle is a sea of drumlins, the small egg-shaped hills left behind by retreating glaciers, with hundreds of little lakes and bogs between them. The southern third lifts into the Ring of Gullion, a circular geological feature surrounding the extinct volcano of Slieve Gullion, which at 573 metres is the highest point in the county. From the summit on a clear day you can see nine counties. There is a Bronze Age cairn on the top, the highest burial cairn in Ireland, and a crater lake just beneath it that locals say never freezes. The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the great epic of Irish literature, opens in this country.
South Armagh has long had a reputation as one of the most strongly Irish-nationalist regions in Northern Ireland. During the Troubles it earned the nickname Bandit Country from the British Army, after Roy Mason's 1975 use of the phrase in a parliamentary debate. The South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional IRA operated here, and a series of attacks across the 1970s and 1980s made the area, in security terms, one of the most lethal patches of ground in Western Europe. The Warrenpoint ambush of August 1979, in which 18 British soldiers died, was carried out by the South Armagh Brigade just over the county boundary in County Down. Even today the southern border is marked less by a fence than by the difference in the painted lines on the road and the language on the road signs. The British Army's hilltop observation towers came down in 2003. The communities that lived under them are still healing.
Half a million apple trees grow in north Armagh. The Bramley apple, that sharp green cooking apple beloved of British kitchens, has been cultivated commercially here since the 1880s and was granted Protected Geographical Indication status by the European Union in 2012. The orchards run from Loughgall through Richhill and Portadown, in dense little squares between hedgerows, and in May they explode into a pale pink-and-white bloom that draws photographers from across the island. The blossom lasts about ten days. Then it is gone, the small green fruit sets, and by October the harvest crews come through with crates and tractors. The county's other great agricultural product is the linen woven for two centuries in the small mills of the Bann valley. Most of those mills are now silent. The orchards are still here.
Armagh's other long-standing nickname, claimed by the city at the county's heart, is the City of Saints and Scholars. The phrase reflects the city's eighth-century role as a school of European reputation, said at its peak to have housed seven thousand students. The county has produced an extraordinary cluster of public figures: the High King Brian Boru, who is buried in Armagh; the singer Tommy Makem, known as the Bard of Armagh; the Pulitzer-winning poet Paul Muldoon, born in Eglish; the actor Colin Morgan; Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, Catholic primate from 1977 to 1990; and the Reverend Ian Paisley, born near Markethill, who founded the Democratic Unionist Party. Few small counties produce such a sharp spectrum of figures across the religious, cultural, and political life of an island. Armagh has been arguing with itself about who it is for sixteen hundred years. The arguments are part of the texture.
County Armagh lies between approximately 54.0°N and 54.55°N, centred near 54.35°N, 6.65°W. From altitude the county is bounded by Lough Neagh in the north, the Ring of Gullion mountains in the south, and the River Blackwater along the western border with County Tyrone. The apple orchards of the north show as dense regular patterns on the ground; the southern drumlins are visible as a sea of small green hills. Best viewed at 4,000-8,000 ft. Nearest airports: Belfast International (EGAA) about 18 nm northeast of Armagh city, Dublin (EIDW) about 65 nm south.