The convent at Killevy
Saint Moninna
Her real name was Darerca. She founded the monastery here around 517 — one of the most important nunneries in early medieval Ireland. She died in 518 and was buried under a stone that's still in the graveyard. The site ran as a religious community for over six hundred years before the Vikings burned it in 923. The two ruined churches you see today are from after that — the west one Romanesque, the east one late Gothic, joined back-to-back in a way you won't see anywhere else.
The lake on the summit
The Cailleach and Fionn
Sliabh gCuilinn — the mountain — turns up in the Fenian cycle. Fionn mac Cumhaill comes across a young woman crying at the edge of a small lake on the summit. She's lost a ring, she says. Fionn dives in. When he climbs back out, ring in hand, the woman is the Cailleach Bhéarra, the old hag of winter, and Fionn is suddenly an old man. The Fianna make her undo most of it but she won't undo all of it — Fionn's hair stays white. The lake is still up there. Don't bathe in it.
Older than Newgrange
The cairn on top
Five thousand years ago, someone hauled stones up to 573 metres and built a passage tomb. It's the highest surviving one in Ireland — a stone chamber 3.6m wide with a corbelled roof, all under a cairn 30 metres across. Radiocarbon dates put it between 3500 and 2900 BC. They got it up there before the wheel. Stand at the entrance and look out at the Mournes, Carlingford Lough, the plain of Louth — and try to imagine what they thought they were doing.
A geological accident
The Ring of Gullion
Slieve Gullion sits at the centre of a near-perfect ring of smaller hills — the world's first recognised ring dyke, mapped here by geologists in the 1870s. The rim formed when an old volcano collapsed in on itself sixty million years ago. It looks, from the air, like a halo. The villages on the inside — Meigh, Killeavy, Mullaghbawn, Forkhill, Drumintee — sit in the basin. The whole thing is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty now. The geologists got there first; the tourists are catching up.