Donal Cam's march

Kinsale was lost on Christmas Eve 1601. Through the year that followed, English forces under Carew and Wilmot hunted Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare across the western peninsulas of Munster, taking the family's strongholds one by one — Dunboy in June 1602 reduced by artillery and the garrison hanged after surrender, the harbour at Berehaven blockaded, the cattle of Beara driven off, the timber of the Beara forests cut to deny shelter to the survivors.

By the last week of December 1602 Donal Cam was at Glengarriff with no fortress left to hold and the country around him stripped bare. He resolved to lead his people overland to the protection of Ó Ruairc of Bréifne in north Leinster — a march of two hundred and fifteen Irish miles, in midwinter, through country garrisoned by his enemies. He set out on the last day of December 1602 with a thousand people: four hundred soldiers, six hundred non-combatants — wives, children, servants, the household priests, the elderly, the wounded.

The line of march took them north through Muskerry into the Ballyhoura mountains, west of the Galtees, across the upper Suir, into the great central plain. They were attacked in earnest at Aughrim in Galway in the second week of January, where they fought through the encirclement, but lost most of their non-combatants in the process — the women and children, weakened by cold and hunger, could not keep the pace required to clear an attack. The crossing of the Shannon at Portumna two days later, on horsehide-and-willow boats made by the Beara fishermen who had walked up from the coast with them, is one of the bravely-recorded acts of the entire seventeenth century.

They reached Leitrim Castle, the seat of Brian Óg Ó Ruairc, on the evening of 14 January 1603 — fifteen days after setting out, with thirty-five people standing. Eighteen were soldiers; one was Donal Cam's wife Eileen MacCarthy; one was the household priest; the rest were the strongest of the original thousand. Most of the others were dead — killed at Aughrim, killed in the river-fights, killed by exposure in the Slieve Aughty hills, killed by hostile country people along the way. A further hundred or so survived but became separated from the main party and reached safety later in ones and twos. The remainder — the great majority of the thousand who had set out — were buried in unmarked graves along the line of march, from Glengarriff to Leitrim.

Donal Cam himself outlived the march by fifteen years. He sailed for Spain later in 1603, was raised to the Spanish nobility as Conde de Birhaven by Philip III, and was killed at Madrid in July 1618 in a street brawl with an English-born exile. His descendants in Spain — the Súlibanes of Cádiz and Galicia — preserved the title into the eighteenth century. The march itself, recorded in detail by Philip O'Sullivan Beare in his Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium of 1621, is the central founding episode of the Sullivan heritage tradition. A commemorative trail along the historical line — the Beara-Breifne Way — is now waymarked along the surviving 500 km from Glengarriff to Blacklion, walked by hikers in the season most of the year.