According to a legend, a 6th-century king of Tara, Murtagh, loaned the stone to his brother, Fergus, king of Scotland. (Some say it was taken by a group of Irish émigrés when they colonised Western Scotland.) It eventually became known as the Stone of Scone. The English stole it in 1296 and put it under the throne at Westminster Abbey, calling it the Coronation Stone. Scottish nationalists stole it from the English and replaced it with a replica. Then Irish nationalists stole it from the Scottish. Some say it was never taken from Tara at all, but no one denies that the stone you see at Tara is the authentic Lia Fáil.
No one in Ireland, that is. The English have recently returned what they think is the Stone of Scone to the Scottish.
Dumha na nGiall
(The Mound of the Hostages)
The Mound of the Hostages is a 5000-year-old passage tomb and is the location of the story Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Burning of Tara. Kings, poets and heroes came to a great gathering (feis) at Tara every three years to make laws, settle disputes and review the poems and stories that every poet kept in his head. In the sixth century, the king's soldiers killed a man who had gone into a church for protection, and St Ruadán cursed Tara -- "May Tara be desolate forever". Tara was abandoned and ceased to be the political capital. However, it remains the spiritual capital of Ireland. The Battle of Tara during the 1798 Rebellion was more symbolic than strategic. In the 1840s, the great Irish leader Daniel O'Connell called a meeting at Tara to protest against the treatment of Catholics. He stood on a wooden platform especially constructed for the occasion on top of the Mound of the Hostages. Over one million people attended. "The Hill of Tara had five names. The first was Druim Decsuin, or the Conspicuous Hill; the second was Liath Druim, or Liath's Hill from a Firbolg chief of that name who was the first to clear it of wood; the third was Druim Cain, or the Beautiful Hill; the fourth was Cathair Crofinn; and the fifth name was Teamair (now Anglicised Tara, from the genitive case Teambrach of the word), a name which it got from being the burial place of Téa, the wife of Eremon, the son of Milesius."
from Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, by Eugene O'Curry, Dublin, 1873.