Hotels near Athboy's Fair Green

For four nights a year the small Meath town of Athboy carries Ireland's claim to have invented Halloween. The Púca Festival runs from Thursday 29 October to Sunday 1 November 2026 across Athboy and Trim, and the Lighting of the Samhain Fire takes place on Athboy's Fair Green on Saturday 31 October. It is free, non-ticketed and standing, with the band Kíla playing. The Fair Green is a six-and-a-half acre common between the Trim Road and the Dunderry Road, walled from the 1840s and handed to public trustees by the Earl of Darnley in 1910.

The reason the fire is lit here rather than in Dublin sits two kilometres east. Tlachtga, the Hill of Ward, is a four-ditched earthwork roughly 150 metres across, over a larger 195-metre enclosure that University College Dublin excavations in 2014 and 2015 dated to the late Bronze Age. The seventeenth-century chronicler Geoffrey Keating recorded that every fire in Ireland was put out on Samhain night and relit from this flame. The hill is private farmland and closed to visitors, so do not plan on climbing it.

Getting out is straightforward and getting back is not. Bus Éireann route 111 runs from Dublin to Athboy via Trim, and the festival adds a dedicated coach from Dublin plus a free hourly Trim-Athboy shuttle taking 20 to 30 minutes. Age limits on the paid shows are strict: 16 and over for the Big Top, 18 and over for the Samhain Circus. Bags larger than 40 cm by 40 cm by 20 cm are refused at every gate.

Pro Tip: Set your satnav for Athboy Library on Main Street, C15 TY80, rather than the Fair Green, which has no single Eircode of its own. Be on the green by 18:00 on 31 October: the common itself holds a crowd, but the two roads feeding into it do not. Check the last shuttle back to Trim before you commit to staying there.