The Beara Peninsula
The Beara peninsula, O’Sullivan’s stronghold, is the ring finger of the Munster coast, Dursey Island a hangnail at the tip. Beara reaches southwestward into the Atlantic below the plump digit of Iveragh and the pointing index of Dingle. The Miskish and Caha Mountains flex like knuckles along its length, jointed across the Healy Pass.
Glengarriff, at the back of Bantry Bay, marks the entrance to the west-Cork peninsula. The little town, unashamedly a tourist trap, is pinned against the sea by the most intricate landscape in Ireland. Sandstone ridges run riot like fossilised waves. They rear up as mountains and subside again into ribs and reefs breaking through the skin of the bog. Wandering roads wind through creases in the rock to spill into hidden valleys.
On the Ordnance Survey maps, sheets 84–5, the peninsula is pocked and measled with the red dots that mark prehistory: standing stones, megalithic tombs, ringforts, rock-art …. Cosmopolitan today, Beara was always somebody’s terrain, a complex homeland of the past.
BANTRY BAY
In late December 1602, two armies camped within a couple of miles of each other in the maze of rock and forest between Bantry Bay and the mountains. One, O’Sullivan’s guerrilla force, was hidden in the oak-woods of Derrynafulla (Doire na fola: oak-wood of the blood). The other was a substantial English army, mopping up the remnants of Munster rebellion. Sir Charles Wilmot, newly appointed governor of Beara, had squeezed several thousand men into a low-lying, open area, to block the passage between the mountains and the sea. The ground was boggy in all its sumps and hollows. The soldiers had permanently soaking feet and wet blankets. They were prone to a fatal ague, a fever of the Irish campaigns. Wilmot’s army was English in function and in name. But the vast majority of the soldiers – more than eighty per cent – were Irish. The same was generally true of Queen Elizabeth’s forces throughout the country.
When the final battle broke out, Wilmot made a checkmate move. He captured the O’Sullivan herd: two thousand cattle and four thousand sheep. In a stroke, O’Sullivan was stripped of his means of survival. Without milk, butter or meat, his people were reduced to ruin. Wilmot’s Irish knew exactly where the animals were pastured, in the coombs and valleys that are tucked like secret pockets around Derrynafulla. The battle for the herd raged for at least six hours, with O’Sullivan’s men, in desperation, giving chase right up to the enemy camp.
Cattle-raiding was a standard strategy of war; it was second nature in a culture where wealth was measured in livestock. The Irish did not make hay, and the herds depended on grazing throughout the year. Food was always scarce in winter as many cows were in calf and consequently dry. Oatmeal, the other staple, was in short supply. The campaign against the rebels had already used starvation tactics. Crops were burned all over Beara. Similar action had brought famine and plague to parts of Munster only twenty years before. With the herd, O’Sullivan also lost one hundred ponies, gearráin, the tough horses fundamental to transport in rugged terrain.
The herd, known as caoruigheacht or creacht, had been amassed partly by the raids O’Sullivan had launched in the surrounding areas throughout the year. No doubt, some of his local enemies were getting their own back. The O’Sullivans themselves were split. One faction of the extended family supported the forces of the Crown. Donal’s cousin, Owen, had fought on the English side at Kinsale. The two had been bitter enemies since a legal clash for the chieftaincy had been resolved in Donal’s favour. Throughout Ireland, many major families were similarly split, with an Irish faction and a Crown rump. Strength and survival were a gamble of allegiance. But such divisions made resistance hopeless.
Within days of the battle, O’Sullivan’s stand had collapsed. Contingents of hired soldiers had already melted away to the north. Others would soon follow. It was not desertion. These were jobbing soldiers, journeymen fighters, tradesmen of a kind. The stink of a lost cause was like a whiff of gangrene to them. Mercenaries worked for wages, not for ideals.
VENGEANCE
The aged, the wounded and the sick remained in the woods of Derrynafulla, while the rest slipped away under cover of darkness. There is a tradition that they stoked the campfires to give the impression that O’Sullivan was still there, licking his wounds, preparing for surrender. It would be four or five days before Wilmot’s men discovered the deception. This motif occurs in stories worldwide. It has the ring of myth, but it represents a different kind of truth, a necessary fiction, a victory of spirit in defeat.
What was Wilmot doing during those four days? Perhaps he felt no need to suffer losses in a further attack when he could starve O’Sullivan out. When the woods were finally raided, the derelict remnants were put to death.
This callous dispatch of the wounded has been depicted as brutality, which indeed it was. But, at the time, it was nothing out of the ordinary, either to the Irish or the English. If Wilmot’s soldiers, probably Irish anyway, had left the victims to starve, that would have seemed equally cruel. Afterwards, Wilmot’s army ravaged and burned Beara, leaving it a wasteland, and that too was a crime against humanity. But that is also what the Irish leader, Red Hugh O’Donnell, had done to the lands of his enemies on his own march south to Kinsale a couple of years before, sowing the bitterness his soldiers would harvest on their harrowing retreat. In a land wasted by war, that same vengeance lay in wait for O’Sullivan.
Abandoning Beara, he began the epic march of survival northwards, which would come to symbolise the tragic instability of its time – a journey through hunger and hostility, into the teeth of winter, through a country where loyalty was being bought, sold and betrayed. His followers numbered just over one thousand, of whom four hundred were fighting-men. Thirteen of these were cavalry, the rest foot soldiers. There were six hundred non-combatants – campfollowers, porters, servants, grooms, dependants of one kind or another. Were they an army? Was it a march, a retreat, or a flight? Depending on the point of view, it was at different times all three. The soldiers were guerrillas; the civilians were fugitives. They would be reduced to refugees, and finally to survivors.
From the beginning, they carried a quantity of gold, sent to O’Sullivan from Spain, instead of the soldiers he needed. It was virtually useless, as nobody had anything to sell. There was also a heavy load of lead for the muskets. There must have been moments when they wished they could dump the lead and fire the Spanish gold instead. The fact that they kept their gunpowder dry, day after day, proves their ingenuity. The soldiers, of course, had extra weapons and equipment; there was a great deal of baggage carried on a limited number of packhorses and by the unfortunate camp-followers.
The stark plan was to abandon Munster and travel immediately north to join forces with Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and former commander-in-chief at Kinsale. He was believed to be in rebellion still in Ulster. Such a journey would involve a south–north traverse of the whole island of Ireland, against the grain of political and military conditions. From the very beginning, food would have to be captured from hard-pressed communities who would defend their resources.
O’Sullivan was accompanied on the march by his seventy-year-old uncle, Dermot of Dursey, and by a dispossessed chieftain, O’Conor Kerry, more ancient still. Carrying food for a single day, the convoy marched over twenty-four miles on New Year’s Eve 1602. That their departure was not betrayed by spies is extraordinary, and it is tempting to imagine that Wilmot let them go in order to avoid a bloody confrontation, having already achieved his ends. The move was executed so swiftly that pursuit would have been futile.
NORTHWARDS
The modern road through Glengarriff weaves along the shore of Bantry Bay, then strikes inland and gradually uphill along the Owvane valley. In winter 2002, the re-enactment of O’Sullivan’s March took this blistering tarmac. Led by a piper in pleasant sunshine, locals escorted the long-distance walkers out along the road, as if to ensure that no one doubled back. The original convoy travelled in this direction. They had assembled in the woods overnight and m
oved out in groups under cover of darkness, slipping along cattle tracks on the lower slopes of the foothills. With their departure, the remaining population of Beara was left at the mercy of Wilmot. In the tradition of victory, he savaged the peninsula. This sums up O’Sullivan’s dilemma, and that of all guerrilla forces. His resistance had provoked an all-out attack by the Crown. When he chose to flee, his people were left defenceless to suffer the consequences.
During the day, they passed within reach of Carriganass Castle, built on a narrow ravine of the Owvane River. It was still in the hands of O’Sullivan’s people, soon to surrender. Perhaps it represented a notional defence against pursuit. A hull of masonry today, with the exposed look of a nut cracked open, the castle stands on a shelf overlooking the river.
MUSKERRY
O’Sullivan was heading for the funnel of Keimaneigh (Céim an Fhia: Deer’s Leap), a pass breaching the Shehy Mountains. Throughout history, the natural barriers of the landscape – mountains, rivers, bogs – separated peoples and events. Those barriers determined where and how journeys were made. Peaceful travel followed the easiest channels; illicit journeys tended towards the hills.1
The route probably did not thread the bed of the ravine, as the modern road does. Keimaneigh was first widened to take a coach in the 1830s. In O’Sullivan’s time, the ravine would have been a bottleneck on the border of hostile terrain, threatened by ambush. Many of his neighbours had gone over to the Crown – some for want of alternative on the collapse of rebellion; some to improve their prospects; and some from an inborn tendency to defect.
I have walked that twenty-four-mile day in winter, with cushioned insoles, thermal underwear and Goretex weather-gear, and was glad of gravity to get me down the long, last, weary hill. The re-enactment went through the pass itself, which is lined with thickets of birch, hazel and ash, spoiled only by the bristling of sitka spruce. The rocks above the road were dark and dripping on New Year’s Eve, 2002. The thinnest twigs of birch were jewelled with rain; they infused the gloom of evening with a delicate purple hue.
FIRST CAMPSITE
Wherever possible, O’Sullivan linked a series of holy places, adding a sense of pilgrimage to his journey. There was nothing new in this. Irish insurgents in the Elizabethan wars saw themselves not only as defending Ireland against the invader, but also as Catholics resisting heretics. This image was used in Europe, where the Counter Reformation was underway, and Ireland claimed assistance both for military reasons and on account of religious persecution.
Gougane Barra
With time, certain journeys develop a seasoned twist that shapes the grain to what ought to have been. According to folklore, instead of the lowland route he had followed from Glengarriff, O’Sullivan went across all the hilltops of west Cork on that first day. It is plausible on the map and is the route a committed hill-walker would favour today. Ignoring the horses and the convoy, tradition ushers him down from the highest mountains in a mantle of rainbows, on a cushion of cloud, into the holy fastness of Gougane Barra, uniting soldier and saint in a triumph of Gaelic spirit. Against a powerful enemy, the Irish always lost the war, but the techniques of symbolic victory were fiercely honed. Other accounts, balking at the mountain, still steer O’Sullivan’s men into Gougane Barra for prayers. But Philip O’Sullivan, nephew of Donal Cam, writing an account of the march, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, does not mention the place at all. According to his terse note of that day, his uncle set up camp ‘in Muskerry country, at a place which the locals call Augeris’.
An Teampaillín, the little church at Eachros, near Ballingeary, was the last place in which the marchers were to rest without disturbance. A tumbledown ruin today, it is tucked away in the fields beyond Cronin’s farmyard (entrance by permission). The ground is soft in winter, easily churned by hooves, but with the look of good summer grazing. The church had no architectural interest, to judge by the fragment of wall and gable standing, but it has an eerie sense of sustained presence. An old ash tree grows within the walls with the venerable look of wood forced up through stone. Even in O’Sullivan’s time, four hundred years ago, the church was in ruins. In that treacherous landscape, its hallowed ground symbolised sanctuary of some sort. A bivouac on holy ground was less likely to provoke the rage of rival factions.
People slumped to the ground in exhaustion at Eachros, wrapped in the clóca, the Irish mantle of homespun wool, so versatile in its simplicity that it could be used in numerous ways, making it a kind of mobile habitat. It was defined by Spenser, the Elizabethan poet, as a camouflage for thieves – although it became standard issue for English soldiers in Ireland.
At that early stage, ponies and people were still carrying possessions. No one abandons the sticks and rags of domestic order until forced to do so. There were probably old mantles for blankets and bedding. Some rawhide tents, very heavy, can be assumed for the leaders. Others would have looped a few rods in the ground and covered them with whatever possible – skins, mantles again, perhaps. There is an ancient tradition that shelters of this kind were roofed with ‘scraws’, lengths of vegetated topsoil stripped from the ground. Until recently, some houses were thatched in this manner.
Smoky fires were lit between stacked stones. The last thing they wanted was to flaunt their presence and provoke the locals. More than the threat of hostility, food occupied their thoughts. People had a consummate knowledge of berries, herbs and roots – of any soup, broth or potion possible. But it was winter and wartime. Philip O’Sullivan’s report says they carried rations for one day – with the length of Ireland ahead of them. The potato was not yet in common use. It is unlikely that many of them had even seen one. Because of the ravages of war, oats may have been as valuable as the Spanish gold. Commentators have guessed at unleavened oatcakes as provisions, and the rough-churned butter which was a means of storing milk for the winter. That might conjure an image of the marchers around a bonfire scoffing homemade bread with lashings of country butter and some of the farmhouse cheeses for which west Cork is famous today. However, when they lost the creacht (the herd), in late December 1602, they lost virtually all means of subsistence.
Inevitably some of the refugees would have been carrying infants. If modern convoys are anything to go by, there must have been children, dressed in rags, bearing pathetic bundles. If so, the pressure of that winter’s day was already taking its toll. For centuries, the ground has been used as a cillín, a graveyard for unbaptised children, stillborn infants, and probably for those denied burial elsewhere. This is the reason why such sites are left undisturbed in desolate privacy. The cillín is one of the deepest wounds in our identity. It leads down into Limbo, where unbaptised souls were shut away from eternal light and ignored by God forever.
The weather appears to have been stable in the early days of the march. It was to change dramatically. From detailed accounts of the Nine Years’ War (1593–1603), we know that the winters were exceptionally severe. The period is sometimes described as a kind of mini-ice-age. A morning campsite in bad conditions is no place for a delicate constitution. Men grow rough on an ugly journey, in order to conceal their fears and weaknesses, be they soldiers, hunters, herders, refugees or mountaineers. Bones are stiff, wounds painful, the belly empty, the spirit low. Discipline barely overcomes failure of the will. The presence of women and children on O’Sullivan’s march would not necessarily mollify the roughness. It could increase it, not just among the brutish, but also among those who understood the annihilation that lay in store for the weak. There must have been soldiers with O’Sullivan who felt that they were being slowed down, and that such a march was no place for non-combatants.
Military discipline does not inspire civilians. After a cold and hungry march, exhaustion takes over and most people stiffen into a stupor. Leadership is essential to rouse them to an effort. Unloading animals, getting them to grass where they can feed, caring for children, keeping watch in shifts – all are part of the effort that keeps a group together under desper
ate conditions. That O’Sullivan was a fine commander becomes obvious as the march goes on, but whether he was an inspiration to his general followers is less certain.
Small groups began to leak away from this point on. There is a trail of families stretching northwards to this day, who claim descent from those who left the march. Some of these claims may well be dubious, because west Cork names are widespread for many reasons. Certain families have carried the ‘Beara’ tag for generations. It is difficult to know whether or not it is genuine, as the tradition could have been assumed retrospectively for the best of motives.
In the morning, O’Sullivan lost his favourite horse, An Chearc, the Hen. The horse is thought to have been named for his high-stepping style, though it hardly seems a compliment – especially since the name is feminine and the horse is thought to have been a stallion. The event is not mentioned in the ‘official’ account, written much later by O’Sullivan’s nephew, Philip, who was brought up in Spain. According to local folklore, An Chearc broke a leg while being led over boggy ground soon after leaving Eachros. People who know little about the marchers and their fate know all about the horse. Sometimes he plunges to his death in a deep hole, or more plausibly, he is shot after breaking a leg. The hole, Poll na Circe, is still pointed out.
Perhaps O’Sullivan was riding the horse at the time of the accident and was tactfully dismounted by folklore? Hardly – folk memory thrives on defect and would never be so generous. Anyway, there is no place as cold and exposed in the morning as a horse’s back. It is far easier to warm up and loosen out on foot. The horse was probably loaded with baggage and being led by a horseboy. It is worth noting that we do not know the names of any of O’Sullivan’s followers, apart from close family, Gaelic nobles such as O’Conor Kerry, and a few senior officers who commanded their own men. We have more personal detail about a horse that died on the second day than we have about a thousand people. Normally, such an imbalance would be the result of the snobbery of Gaelic writers and historians who erased the common people from the record, while a favourite horse or dog might get honourable mention. However, An Chearc is recorded only in folk tradition. Since the story concerns a faithful animal with a contradictory name, it was probably told to generations of children, along with tales of Oisín’s white horse and Fionn Mac Cumhail’s hunting dogs. We remember the tales of childhood and we pass them on in turn.
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