RATHFRILAND, Northern Ireland — It all started in 2017 with a trench. In that year, a power company was preparing to build a 135-foot-tall wind turbine at the summit of Knock Iveagh, a pre-Christian ceremonial hill just outside the market town of Rathfriland. Anne Harper, a musician and longtime local whose spirituality is best described as “Celtic,” stared at the trench in disbelief. “They just dug it, and we watched them dig a trench all the way around. I said at the time, ‘They’re putting a noose around the hill.’ Oh, God. 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 buttercup whin and gazed at the mountain as the tip of a white propeller sliced through the air, just visible over the crest. There — and there, again. Three blades beat in the distance on endless rotation. “Traumatic,” she said. “There has been no justice.”
The turbine wasn’t just an act of industrial development, she 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.”
Adding to the desecration of the site is its new inaccessibility. For the first time in centuries, Harper said, public access to the Knock has been denied. Although the land 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. Harper is currently collecting testimonies from the local community to establish a legal right of way — a doctrine in U.K. law that allows citizens to claim that a privately owned plot has been historically used by the public and should remain accessible as such. “That fight really is time-bound,” she said. “If we don’t prove the public always had access, we lose that right forever.”
On the winter solstice last year, a group climbed the Knock through the haze of early morning darkness. At the top, they gathered in a circle, listening to nothing but ancient wind whipping through tufts of grass. One by one, they planted recycled muslin flags on top of the hill, giving form to the strong gusts. White tails of cloth rippled in the breeze.
Niamh Mourne, a local sound healer from County Down, began her prayer — a meditation, a connection to the earth and the sky, a calling to the four points of the compass. Mourne sang out to the wind. It replied, crescendoing through misty clouds and distant mountains. Drums began to pound, a steady rhythm echoing on 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. “It was a vital experience. A mindful connection with the ancestors, the earth and the elements.”
The threat to Knock Iveagh is not just a local issue. Eamonn P. Kelley, an Irish historian and archaeologist, said it’s a symbol of a wider reckoning between heritage and development across the Republic and the North. Kelley cited other cases where heritage sites have been overlooked: a motorway built through the medieval Carrickmines Castle in Dublin; the construction over Viking remains at Wood Quay; and 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 Kelley, 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 very 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, an elected official who is the Ulster Unionist Party Member of the Legislative Assembly for Upper Bann, said the Knock is “one of those key points” where ancient 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 in the country, 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. “It’s symbolic of how we’re treating our ancient heritage,” he said. “Knock Iveagh is older than the pyramids. We have thrown it away. And nobody really cares.” Beattie said other instances of heritage destruction have occurred in Northern Ireland: Neolithic stones from the Ballintaggart court tombs were removed, placed in a museum but never displayed; and planning permission was granted to build housing directly over a rath — an early ringfort — 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 in Northern Ireland, 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 say 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 1,100 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 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 Kelley. “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 believes the department that made the planning error should shoulder the cost. “The mistake was yours,” he said. “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 the Public Accounts Committee Investigation into Renewables Incentives in Northern Ireland in 2021, the Friends of 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 pounds.
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 American Irish descendant of the mighty Magennis chiefs, a clan who ruled the territory of Iveagh, which once spanned more than half of what is now County Down, including the site of Knock Iveagh. McGinnis was on his annual pilgrimage to his homeland in 2023 when he learned about the sacred hill.
Although his royal ancestors were inaugurated there, McGinnis has never been on the Knock. “I hopped the fence,” he said. “But I turned around. I didn’t want to sneak up there or trespass. I have a right to go there and I don’t want to go there until everyone is able to, legally. It just infuriates me.”
McGinnis believes the site would have been treated differently had it been located in the Republic of Ireland. “There, those sites are more protected,” he said. “They’re part of the national story.”
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 group has since organized storytelling walks, ghost tours and seasonal ceremonies to keep community memory alive. “We reestablished our narrative about what the site meant,” Harper said. “We can’t take the turbine down, but we’re reimagining it. We’re not being victims — and that makes you quite powerful.”