Historic town, Abbeyland, Co. Meath

The area was once known as Odhbha, a name recorded in the Annals of Ulster as early as 612, when a battle was fought there among the Aed Sláine branch of the Uí Néill. According to tradition, Odhbha was a daughter of Milesius, the legendary leader of the last of the five mythological invasions of Ireland, and her burial mound was said to mark the place. The Dindshenchas, a collection of place-lore compiled between the ninth and twelfth centuries, describes Odhbha as a grave on a ridge. That mound may well have been the very same earthwork on which the Anglo-Normans later raised their motte and bailey castle, a form of fortification consisting of a raised earthen mound topped by a timber tower, adjoined by an enclosed courtyard. So beneath the foundations of a medieval castle there may lie the remains of something far older, a landscape feature already layered with myth before the first Norman soldier arrived.

The broader story of the town's naming is almost comic in its convolution. Odhbha drifted, through ordinary phonetic wear, into Novan and then Nouan, the form that appears in the charters of the Augustinian abbey of St. Mary's after 1170. In Gaelic the same name corrupted differently, into Uaimh, meaning cave or grave, which made it an oddly fitting description of the original burial mound. Hugh de Lacy had granted the barony of Navan to Jocelyn de Angelo by 1175, and the town that grew at the confluence of the Blackwater and the Boyne acquired its corporate status only in 1462. It was plundered by O'Neill and O'Donnell in 1539, and in 1543 Parliament levied a charge on every ploughland in Meath to fund the building of town walls. Despite this, murage taxes having been collected since at least the fifteenth century, the walls may never have been fully completed; by 1593 Navan was classified as a market town rather than a walled one. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 still noted named gates, Feshings Gate and the Dublin Gate among them, along with Sweynes Bridge, two castles, and four stone houses.

The Down Survey barony map of 1656 to 1658 shows the town as a compact rectangular enclosure pressing against the Boyne to the north-east, with the Augustinian abbey sitting just outside the walls to the north and a bridge crossing the Blackwater below it. The Boyne itself had no bridge until around 1750; the land on the far bank was called Athlumney, from Áth Luimnigh, interpreted as the ford of the bare place or perhaps of the herds, suggesting people and animals crossed the river long before any permanent structure spanned it. The walled town covered only around seven hectares in total, its three streets converging on a triangular Market Square. A section of the medieval wall still survives behind houses on the south side of Abbey Road, and excavations elsewhere in the town continue to find medieval deposits lying beneath centuries of later construction and dumped material, the accumulated weight of a place that has never quite stopped building over its own past.