Blades Over The Burial Mound: The Fight To Save A Sacred Northern Ireland Site
RATHFRILAND, Northern Ireland — It all started in 2017 with a trench. That year, a power company was preparing to build a 135-foot-tall wind turbine near the summit of Knock Iveagh, a pre-Christian ceremonial hill outside the market town of Rathfriland.
Anne Harper, a musician and local whose spirituality is best described as “Celtic,” stared at the trench in disbelief. “We watched them dig a pit all the way around. I said, ‘They’re putting a noose around the hill.’ That was so hard to watch.”
For Harper, the view is even worse now. On a recent spring day, she pushed her way through a thicket of whin and gazed at the mountain as a white propeller sliced through the air, just visible over the crest. There — and there, again. Three blades turned endlessly in the distance. “There has been no justice,” she said.
The turbine wasn’t just an act of industrial development, Harper added. It was a spiritual and cultural rupture.
“That place was my church. It was the place I felt most peaceful, you know, connected. A church with no ceiling,” she said.
Adding to the desecration of the site is its new inaccessibility. For the first time in centuries, she said, public access to the Knock has been denied. Although the hill is widely acknowledged to be used publicly, it’s technically private land. After Harper led a small group to the summit for a winter solstice ceremony last year — honoring what many believe to be the hill’s ancient role in sun worship — she received a letter from the landowner warning they were trespassing.
The group Save Knock Iveagh is currently collecting testimonies from the local community to establish a legal right of way — a doctrine in UK law that allows for citizens to claim that a privately owned plot has been historically used by the public and should remain accessible as such.
“That fight is time-bound,” Harper said. “If we don’t prove the public always had access, we lose that right forever.”
On last year’s winter solstice, a group climbed the Knock through the haze of early morning darkness. At the top, they gathered in a circle, listening to nothing but wind whipping through tufts of grass.
Niamh Mourne, a sound healer from County Down, began her prayer — a meditation, a connection to the earth and the sky. Mourne sang out to the wind. It replied, crescendoing through misty clouds and distant mountains. Drums began to pound, echoing on the ancient earth. The shy sun showed the crown of its head in the southeast. The group began to cheer.
“It was as if we were being rewarded by a beautiful sunrise,” said Harper.
The threat to Knock Iveagh is not just a local issue. Eamonn P. Kelly, an Irish historian and archaeologist, said it’s a symbol of a wider reckoning between heritage and development across the Republic and the North. Kelly cited other cases where significant sites have been overlooked: a motorway built through the medieval Carrickmines Castle in Dublin; the construction over Viking remains at Wood Quay; a proposed wind farm in Galway Bay where 324-meter turbines would tower above the pre-Christian maritime pilgrimage site of MacDara’s Island.
“This thing should never have been put up,” said Kelly, who authored a historical study on the Knock’s ritual past. “It’s a very important location, and to stick a wind turbine on top of it is destructive and disrespectful.”
Knock Iveagh is a 5,000-year-old sacred landscape, crowned with a Neolithic burial cairn, connected to a web of archaeological features. Remnants of hazelnuts suggest celebrations of festivals like Samhain; 64 pieces of quartz sing of sun worship; layers of ancient ash hint at the glimmers of ritual fires. In the Middle Ages, the Knock was the inauguration site of the Magennis chiefs of Iveagh.
Doug Beattie, the elected Ulster Unionist Party Member of the Legislative Assembly for Upper Bann, said the Knock is “one of those key points” where tribal kingship emerged,
“It predates the plantation. It predates all the arguments that we have. It’s incredibly important to understand how civilization here evolved.” Beattie said the Knock transcends political divisions, contributing to a layered cultural identity: “I am Irish. Of course, I'm British as well. I don't think there's a divide on this.”
Beyond identity, Beattie sees the Knock as emblematic of a deeper failure to protect the island’s sacred sites, “I mean, Knock Iveagh is older than the pyramids. We’ve thrown it away. And nobody really cares.” Beattie said there have been other instances where heritage destruction has occurred: Neolithic stones from the Ballintaggart court tombs were removed, placed in a museum but never displayed; planning permission was granted to build housing directly over a rath – a type of circular earthwork used as a dwelling and stronghold in ancient Ireland — and an old grange in Waringston.
In the case of the Knock, Beattie called for immediate action.
“The first thing is to get that wind turbine down. The second thing is to restore the place to the way it was. And the third thing is to give protected public access.” Beattie said he will be writing to The Minister for Communities, Gordon Lyons, asking for an outline of the public right of way at Knock Iveagh.
Despite the hill’s historic value, the turbine was approved in 2013 by the Department of the Environment, a since-devolved government department in the Northern Ireland Executive. But opponents of the development claim that no environmental or archaeological impact assessment was carried out — a fact that continues to anger Harper and members of the Save Knock Iveagh group, which has over 1,000 followers on Facebook. After the dissolution of the DoE, reform of local government in Northern Ireland saw planning powers transferred to local councils in 2015.
The application was greenlit, opponents of the development said, because DoE planners failed to consult archaeology experts from the Historic Environment Division (HED) who later said they would have recommended its rejection, as the BBC reported at the time. Information revealed to Save Knock Iveagh under freedom of information legislation showed that the Historic Monuments Council believed the turbine would have a “large/very large adverse impact” on the site’s historic position, the BBC also reported.
“In order to ensure that we have balanced development, there are statutory bodies in place,” said Kelly. “It’s a pity that people in the state, whose job it was to do precisely that, failed.”
Even with political support to remove the turbine, the question of who will pay if it is to be taken down remains unresolved.
“This has now gone from what is a central issue to a localized council issue,” Beattie said.
Though the DoE originally approved the turbine, it’s now the local Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council that must decide whether to enforce removal — and foot the bill.
“It would be in the millions,” Beattie said, referring to compensation costs the council would have to pay the turbine owner if planning permission were revoked. “The council would have to put that to the people of the borough.”
Beattie said the department that made the planning error should shoulder the cost: “The mistake was yours. It’s up to you to sort out.”
The owner of the turbine, Ayr Power Ltd, is registered offshore in the Isle of Man. In a letter submitted to a Public Accounts Committee investigation into renewables incentives in Northern Ireland in 2021, Save Knock Iveagh alleged that the company responsible for the turbine had been in receipt of Renewable Obligation Certificates, government subsidies for energy generation, worth at least £299,250.
Ayr Power has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
The money may have flowed offshore, but the impact was personal — and not just for locals. Philadelphia-based Thomas McGinnis is an Irish American descendant of the mighty Magennis chiefs, a clan who ruled the territory of Iveagh which included the site of Knock Iveagh. McGinnis was on his annual pilgrimage to his homeland in 2023 when he learned about the hill.
Although his royal ancestors were inaugurated there, McGinnis has never been on the Knock. “I didn’t want to sneak up there or trespass. I don’t want to go there until everyone is able to, legally.”
“It just infuriates me,” he said.
McGinnis said he believes the site would have been treated differently had it been located in the Republic of Ireland.
“There, those sites are more protected. They’re part of the national story,” he added.
That sense of loss — not just of access, but also of community and culture — is part of what Harper and her group are trying to address. “We’ve tried really hard in this campaign not to go mad,” she said. “So, we balanced it with friendship, art and fun and research.”
The community has since organized storytelling walks and seasonal ceremonies.
“We re-established our narrative about what the site meant,” Harper said. “We can’t take the turbine down, but we’re not being victims. And that makes you quite powerful.”
Christiana Alexakis is a freelance journalist and graduate student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism School in New York, covering climate, culture and social justice.