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They call it King John's Castle. When King John came, he slept in a tent on the far bank of the Boyne.
Hugh de Lacy was given Meath in 1172 and put a wooden fort on the rise above the ford. It burned the next year. What replaced it took father and son half a century and three separate building campaigns: a keep of three storeys, cruciform, with twenty corners — a shape found on no other Norman keep — inside walls three metres thick, on thirty thousand square metres of ground.
From here Meath was governed, and here the Pale stopped. Parliament sat in the town seven times, a mint worked inside the walls, and in 1399 Richard II left the boy who would become Henry V behind as a prisoner.
Then it stopped mattering. For some years in the twentieth century the town council rented part of the castle field as a municipal rubbish dump. The state took the castle back, spent around 4.5 million euro on it and reopened it in 2000.
Braveheart used the ground outside the walls for York and the keep for the Tower of London. The grounds are open to walk. The keep is only with a guide: the stairs are too narrow to let anyone up alone.