WE never knows who'll come over the brow of the hill into his tea and craft shop at Tara. The Irish American acting confraternity are the latest on the Celtic trail with Aidan Quinn, aka Harry Boland, and Pierce Brosnan among recent visitors. But Liam Clancy has been there too, and Tommy Makem and John Bruton who, as befits a Meath Taoiseach and national chieftain visiting this most famous regal site, brought his offspring along to show them the terrain.
Michael Maguire and his family have been offering hospitality of one kind or another on Tara for at least six generations. His ancestors - including Devines and Sheridans - are buried in the graveyard behind the shop. It was some of them, most likely, who offered refreshment to Daniel O'Connell after he roused a crowd of hundreds of thousands from the nearby Mound of the Hostages.
Now Michael provides "food like the food we were reared on in this house" - speciality rhubarb tart - to whatever travellers appear from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. But if his development plans go smoothly he'll soon be providing evening meals as well, with actors dressed as Finn MacCool, St Patrick and plenty more besides dashing around the tables serving dinner while telling the story of Tara. Then there are the plans to commemorate the 1798 battle of Tara, the anniversary of which falls next year.
"People are sometimes disappointed when they come because it's mounds on a hill with no markings on them but if you were to label and package and Disneyfy it in such a way that you didn't have to think about it all, the romance would be lost," he says, summing up the real magic of Tara.
Precisely because all the buildings are long gone you have to imagine the passage graves constructed here long, long before Christianity and St Patrick's time - they found the body of a boy here once dating back to 1350 BC with Egyptian beads buried beside him.
You have to picture the athletes who once gathered here for the ancient Tailtean Games and the thousand-odd revellers who crowded the grass outlines of what was the banqueting hall to be feasted at Samhain. What stories these grass-grown mounds have to tell.
Brush up on your Thomas Moore, sing a few bars of The Harp That Once Through Tara's Hall and you'll be transported to another era.
According to Michael Maguire, St Patrick's Day is one of the quietest on Tara. "People go to the parades in the big towns and come out here at four or five for a walk on the hills. It must be the curse of the Druids against St Patrick because he was the one to put a stop to all the old pagan traditions they once indulged in up here. But then that was the start of Christianity, which has brought us to where we are today.
With an interpretive centre now located in the Protestant church on the Hill of Tara, it is definitely worth the pilgrimage. Maybe never more so than on St Patrick's Day with its crowd-free, wide windy spaces. As others drink green beer and don plastic hats why not comingle with the spirit of the man himself on Tara?