Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  In any case, it is hard to believe that the starving throng would not have butchered the carcass and eaten it, as soldiers have always done (on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, for example). There is a sense of an elevated decision from the top. Philip reports on later occasions that Donal Cam and his uncle Dermot both abstained from horseflesh. In Ireland, there was a traditional respect for horses – a sense that they were not far removed from human status. That respect would soon be vindicated.

  BALLYVOURNEY

  Late that morning, they reached the village of Ballyvourney and stopped to visit the shrine of St Gobnait, famed for healing. Eighteen months earlier, Pope Clement VIII had marked this shrine with a special indulgence for those who prayed for the Church in the battle against heretics. There, in Philip’s words, the soldiers ‘gave vent to unaccustomed prayers, and made offerings, beseeching the saint for a happy journey’. The Ballyvourney saint had a way of ignoring prayers. For centuries, a one-eyed statue was kept in the care of the O’Herlihys. A cure for smallpox was traditionally associated with the wooden image of the saint. Its reputation suffered, however, when two of the custodians came down with smallpox.

  Philip O’Sullivan Beare, the commentator, was ten or twelve years old and already in Spain when his uncle, Donal Cam, marched out of west Cork, never to return. Dermot O’Sullivan, the old man accompanying Donal, was actually Philip’s father. Philip grew up to have a career in the Spanish navy and to become a colourful voice in Europe on behalf of Ireland. His strident excesses caused his counterparts to cringe. While his work is inaccurate in many areas, it seems reasonable to trust the practical details of his uncle’s journey, although Philip never missed an opportunity to strike a heroic pose from the safety of the next generation.

  THE MACCARTHYS

  The march moved on and ran into its first conflict. The attackers were the sons of Thady MacCarthy from the castle of Carrigaphooca by the River Sullane, former allies of Donal Cam. Not only had they defected to the English, but they also kept the bribe which O’Sullivan had paid for their loyalty. To their indignation, he had attacked their castle and taken his money back. If it weren’t for the underlying tragedy of dispossession and death, one might observe that many episodes of the period have that kind of cowboy quality.2

  The attack on the march lasted four hours, with the Sons of Thady MacCarthy trailing the convoy, snapping viciously at its heels and scattering under fire. It is tempting to see them whooping in on fast ponies, snapping off shots and wheeling away. However, the musket was a hopelessly clumsy gun that took a long time to load and fire. As well as being smoky and inaccurate, it was prone to blowing up in the face of the musketeer. Guns were scarce and must have been major status symbols. Still, the shooting went on and on, as if the possession of weapons was the actual reason for the attack. Like a dog, a gun demands exercise.

  O’Sullivan’s troops were divided in two, with one section at the head of the march, the other guarding the rear, herding the civilians onwards. MacCarthy’s sidekicks seized every chance to slip alongside and fire into the straggling mass before the soldiers headed them off. The attack would then recoup and press harder on the depleted rear. The civilians resembled nothing so much as the creacht, which had been lost. Burdened, helpless, hustled along, they must have heard the noise of muskets like the cracking of unseen whips behind their backs. The vanguard must have taken to wooded ground to give cover on the vulnerable flanks. A great deal of baggage was lost. Loads were shed by pack animals and by running fugitives who had carried their possessions nearly thirty miles already, up and over the Pass of Keimaneigh the previous day, hoping that the weight on their backs would be the makings of a new life somewhere to the north.

  Suddenly, O’Sullivan wheeled his formation around, pulled his advance guard to the rear and attacked the Mac Carthy forces head-on with doubled numbers. It was not as simple as it sounds. The tactic must have been hard to handle on the move and under fire. Some of the enemy was slain in the head-on clash, and the rest fled.

  The convoy was attacked again by another faction of the MacCarthys, from Kilmeady Castle, near Millstreet, where O’Sullivan camped that night. It appears to have been a token flourish, the way a dog runs snarling to the gate when a bigger beast is safely past.

  On that day also, O’Sullivan travelled twenty-four miles. Nothing had been eaten all day. They were left in no doubt as to local opinion. Throughout the night, a barrage of howls and yells raged in the darkness beyond the campsite. Sleeplessness was added to hunger. If there was any satisfaction to be had, it lay in knowing that the locals were sleepless too. No time was wasted on breakfast ….

  The pattern was to continue. The country ahead was seething with fear and hostility in the aftermath of war. O’Sullivan had no option but to pick a way through the Munster hills, dodging from height to height, weaving north towards the Shannon. The dangerous valleys and plains had to be crossed too. There is no reference to local guides, but his Connacht mercenaries would have travelled this terrain before.

  At the ford of Ballybahellagh on the River Allow, between Newmarket and Liscarroll, the next battle occurred. The Allow rises in the Mullaghareirk Hills on the Cork and Limerick border and flows into the Blackwater to the west of Mallow. An English garrison defended the ford, with Irish support as usual. O’Sullivan was outnumbered, according to Philip. Stafford’s English account has the balance the other way round (Pacata Hibernia). A hard-fought battle ensued, ‘with red-hot balls from both sides’. It lasted about an hour. Philip identified the opposing forces in black and white, hammering home, for a European audience, the heroic struggle between the faithful and the heretics:

  In this fight four of the Catholics fell; the royalists lost more, many were wounded, and perhaps more would have perished, although they were superior in numbers, were it not that the Catholics, through want and weariness were unable to pursue them. The Catholics having buried their dead and in turns carrying the wounded in military litters, accomplished a march of thirty miles that day ….

  Obviously, it was not in Philip’s interest to acknowledge that most of the royalists were also Irish Catholics. But he was caught between the conflicting need to tell Catholic Europe of the fate endured by the Irish at the hands of heretics, while at the same time avenging himself on the Gaelic clans who had turned their weapons on the people of west Cork. The stigma has long since vanished, and the anniversary march of 2002–3 was welcomed everywhere by the descendants of original enemies. Four hundred years later, the same family names are found in the same areas all along the route.

  THE GOLDEN VALE

  Almost eighty miles had been covered in three extraordinary days, and O’Sullivan had reached a point identified in the Annals of the Four Masters as Ardpatrick, in Co. Limerick. This is also a holy place, another rough bead in O’Sullivan’s rosary. The heather-brown of the Ballyhoura Mountains ranked behind it emphasises Ardpatrick’s claim to be the highest green hill in Ireland. This grassy dome has a long history of significance. A church on top, one of the high points of early Christianity, was replaced by the monastery and tower now slumped in ruins. It is easy to see why the early Church would choose such a landmark, dominating the pastoral plains of Limerick, some of the richest land in Ireland. If anything, Ardpatrick suggests a stack of this lush land heaped up high to show how much there is to spare. What did the starving men of west Cork, raised on rock, think of this magnificent ground as they stumbled through the grass, scraping up roots to cook for soup? The land may have been wild at the time, after a decade of unrest, and perhaps they were spared that vision of the unattainable.

  ‘On the following day,’ Philip writes poignantly, ‘they refreshed themselves with cresses and water and hurried along in a direct route before sunrise.’ Today, more than any other place in Ireland, that direct route is awash with milk. Philip, who worked in Latin, actually wrote cum se leguminibus et aqua refecissent. It was the translator, nudged into association perhaps by that aqua who nar
rowed the focus to watercress, associated in Gaelic literature with hermits for its cleanness and ascetic flavour. The image of the multitude setting forth across the Golden Vale, fortified by sprigs of cress after days of hunger, has taken a powerful hold in a culture eager for symbols of pure courage in adversity. Out of pity, we can only hope that Philip was exaggerating as he often was, or that cum leguminibus might have included root vegetables of some kind, although potatoes would not be widely grown in Ireland for another forty years.

  The crossing of the open plain between the Ballyhoura Mountains and Slieve Felim to the northeast would be the most exposed section of the march so far. Controlled by Maurice Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond (known as the White Knight), the route passes near the present towns of Kilfinnane and Emly. The shifting alliances of the Irish and the ferocious consequences of such change are crystallised in the career of the Geraldine White Knight. His military base was at Hospital, so named from an earlier foundation of the Knights Hospitallers. After sustained resistance, Fitzgerald had submitted to English rule in May 1600, and was away campaigning against rebel Irish when O’Sullivan stumbled into his territory. Despite the White Knight’s absence, the area was heavily defended by an assortment of soldiers and local mercenaries, particularly of the Gibbons clan. The mix was thickened by men from Limerick city.

  They must have made a considerable force, because they hammered and tore at O’Sullivan throughout the day, ‘charging boldly in front, rear, and baggage which was carried in the middle, attacking all at once.’ The Sons of Thady MacCarthy were only an irritation compared to this. The running battle lasted eight hours, and the gunfire from both sides was at times so heavy that the opposing sides could not see each other. That detail reads like a flourish from Philip’s experience of war in the Spanish navy rather than the discharge of muskets on a windy plain in January; but there is no reason to doubt the claim that O’Sullivan could neither carry off his wounded nor bury his dead.

  FOOD RAID

  Despite heavy losses, they covered twenty miles that dreadful day, to camp at Solohead, Sulchóid, where Brian Boru had routed the Danes of Limerick AD 968. The night appears to have been the coldest so far. The starving soldiers foraged for plants and roots and huddled around the fires that drew attention to their presence. Their wounds and losses must have stripped away all reserve and left them with a single option. In the morning, they attacked a tower on the prominent mound of Donohill. The local O’Dwyers defended it.

  The first to break in devoured whatever food they could lay hands on, while the rest fed on ‘meal, beans and barley grains like cattle’. Donohill was always a centre for milling, and quantities of grain must have been stored in the tower against the threat of a starving army. There was probably only enough for a bellyful for the lucky few. The entire country was in the grip of hunger and it is unlikely that Donohill was a treasury of golden grain. Barley can indeed be eaten raw. It is still customary to rub ears of corn between the palms while walking the fields, to blow the husks away and to chew the grain into a floury paste. If the whisker is swallowed, it feels like a fishbone in the throat. Twenty miles were covered again that day, and maybe those who had hurled food down their gullets regretted the lack of restraint. Raw food passes through a starving stomach like shot through a musket barrel.

  It took two more days to reach a crossing point on the Shannon. The numbers were reduced by a third already. Apart from the dead, and the wounded who had been left behind, others had melted away or failed to keep up. The Irish countryside was by no means deserted at the time. The population is put at a tentative 1.4 million in 1600, though the aftermath of war, with famine and plague, was reducing numbers, particularly in Munster. It is hard to imagine that stragglers on O’Sullivan’s journey could have put down roots without local support, or at least tolerance. Individual acts of kindness must have occurred, but they were not recorded; there is nothing to relieve that baleful sense of a country hounding its own outcasts, grinding them down to skeletons and ghosts.

  So far, the route had threaded the logic of the hills, while they lasted. It was by no means a random, reeling flight, but a sequence of strategic dashes and sorties. Just as the Pass of Keimaneigh breached the Shehy Mountains, an ancient route led north through the Slieve Felim range, avoiding the hostile plains of Tipperary and Limerick to the east and west. That this was a major passage is reflected not only in the journey of O’Sullivan, but also in the routes of O’Donnell and Patrick Sarsfield, who passed in different directions through the Slieve Felim village of Hollyford on illicit missions, at opposite ends of that century. In O’Sullivan’s case, there was no escaping confrontation; the heat was on. The idiom is apt because, on the morning of 6 January, in Philip’s words, ‘a storm of red-hot balls blazed on O’Sullivan as he advanced. This was a daily salutation with which the enemy honoured him; a farewell as they drew off at night; a greeting as they turned up in the morning.’

  Chieftains and leaders had to put on a bold show of allegiance to the Crown in order not to fall victim themselves. But zeal in the execution of harsh duty has always been a characteristic of power, even when it has just changed sides.

  Any attempt to hack their way onwards to the east of the Shannon would be suicidal. The Crown stronghold of King’s County (Offaly) lay just ahead, fraught with garrisons and showers of molten lead. Crossing the River Shannon made no geographical sense; it was a political and a military choice. Connacht would be more Gaelic, less hostile. In choosing that route, O’Sullivan was leading many of his hired soldiers home. Perhaps they had no intention of being led anywhere else. Perhaps they were leading him.

  He would be repeating, almost exactly in reverse, Red Hugh O’Donnell’s march south from Ballymote in Sligo, a year before, en route to Kinsale. Maps of the two marches show an identical kink, the same sidestep across the Shannon midway. O’Donnell, in his pillaging of the route, had done no one any favours, least of all his own troops, slinking back in disorder a short while later.

  SHANNON CROSSING

  Brought up close to the route, in Roscommon, I had heard echoes of the events in primary school – O’Donnell going down, O’Sullivan coming up. It was like being tuned between two radio-stations, a circus parade in one ear, a funeral march in the other. The two journeys, so similar in itinerary, mark the high and the low points of the Nine Years’ War – triumph and desolation.

  O’Sullivan tackled the Shannon just north of Portumna. This point was within reach of Redwood Castle, home of the MacEgans, Clann Mhic Aodhagáin, a long-established family noted for scholarship and learning. For centuries, the MacEgans had been academic figures in Gaelic culture, professors of the Brehon laws to all Ireland. Students came to them as to an academy. Cairbre MacEgan and his son Flann were held in high regard in the Gaelic world. If O’Sullivan had any luck at all, they could be expected to appreciate his credentials. Unfortunately, the MacEgans were in a royalist phase. Donogh, son of Cairbre and brother of Flann, was the local Queen’s Sheriff. To many later observers, this was like being Sheriff of Nottingham in the time of Robin Hood.

  All boats had been withdrawn at Donogh’s order from the Shannon, and the ferrymen were warned ‘under the severest penalties’ not to carry O’Sullivan over. That was already a severe penalty on the boatmen, with hundreds of passengers on the horizon and O’Sullivan still carrying the Spanish gold. He was caught in a trap, his back to the river, the expanse of Lough Derg downstream, and military extinction guaranteed to the north.

  The river was wider then than now; drainage has deepened and narrowed it – and presumably speeded up the current. The Redwood bank, still boggy today, was a sprawling marsh. A little further back, it was heavily wooded. The Beara men went to ground in a clearing on 7 January. They dug a defensive trench and built a barrier of felled trees. Gort na gCapall (field of the horses) is flanked by an acre or so of dense shrubbery today: mainly ash, heavy with ivy and overgrown at the base by whitethorn and briar. Doubtful whether anything grow
ing there now is even a hundred years old, and yet the imagination seizes on the trees at once as O’Sullivan’s lair. A pair of old pylons carries a power line across the river at this point today.

  The MacEgans

  Hereditary professors of Brehon law to the local O’Kennedys, the MacEgans would continue to be reputable Gaelic scholars, and a few years later the work of the Four Masters would be brought here to Flann MacEgan for an imprimatur. This is a little eerie: the annals were principally compiled by Michael O’Clery, a former pupil of the MacEgans, and the work would also contain an account of the events that were to befall O’Sullivan at MacEgan hands. These tangled strands hint at the complex connections and contradictions of the Gaelic world.

  Philip credits his father, Dermot of Dursey, with the idea of building a boat. Competition set in. The O’Malleys of Mayo reckoned that they could build a better boat than the Cork men could. Twelve horses were killed and skinned. The flesh was eaten by the ravenous horde, except, as Philip insists, by his own father and by his uncle, Donal Cam.