The False King of Tara
Lugaid mac Con — Mac Con, the Hound’s Son — was the king who displaced Art mac Cuinn from Tara with Mongfind‘s support, and who lost it again when a boy corrected his judgment and the land itself agreed.
A woman’s sheep had strayed into a queen’s garden and eaten her woad plants. Lugaid ruled that the sheep should be forfeit to the queen as compensation. The young Cormac mac Airt — present at Tara, not yet known for who he was — stood up and said the judgment was wrong. The shearing of the sheep should pay for the woad, since both wool and woad would grow back. The sheep’s life was not equivalent to the woad plants.
Before anyone could argue the point, the side of Tara that had stood over Lugaid’s false judgment fell away down the hill. The land rejected the ruling. Lugaid was asked to name his lineage. He left.
He came back after his exile, fought again, and was killed. The tradition is clear that Tara’s own response to his judgment — the wall falling — was the decisive event. Everything after that was the physical consequence of what the land had already decided.
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