The Harrowing March of the O’Sullivan Beare

Along the rugged sweep of Bantry Bay, the land holds memory like stone. To the north rises the Beara Peninsula, to the south the long finger of Sheep’s Head, and between them the waters stretch out to the Atlantic. This is a mythic country. The Cailleach Bhéarra herself is said to walk here - the great old woman, shapeshifter and rebel, who strikes the rocks with her staff and moulds the mountains to her will. Her spirit is threaded through cliffs and cairns, through stories of sovereignty and survival, reminding us that this is a land which endures. The landscape itself bears witness. West Cork holds more megalithic and archaeological sites per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world. Standing stones tilt towards the horizon, stone circles still catch the rising and setting sun, wedge tombs sink into the moss, ogham lines scar the rock. Even the famine ridges - the potato beds cut by desperate hands - lie stark along the rocky coastline still, long after the blight and hunger of the nineteenth century. This is a land of resilience, of memory, and of rebellion — and it is from here that one of Ireland’s most harrowing journeys began.

It is little wonder that Cork is called the Rebel County. For centuries, resistance has risen here against conquest. Colonisation by the English Crown meant that Irish people were stripped of their lands, forced to rent their own ancestral fields from English landlords, while crops and cattle were seized and shipped away to feed England. Foreshore rights and access to the sea were denied. Hunger became a weapon long before An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine, and rebellion took root because there was no other way to live with dignity. For over seven hundred years, the people of Ireland lived under the shadow of English power - a long tyranny of land-taking, death, and loss.

It was in this crucible that Dónal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, one of the last great Irish Chieftans, made his stand. The Nine Years’ War (1594 - 1603) was the last great Irish rising against English rule. Dónal Cam fought with all he had, but the catastrophic defeat at Kinsale in 1601 - despite Spanish aid - brought the Irish resistance to its knees. In 1602, Dunboy Castle, his ancestral stronghold, fell after a brutal siege. Dónal himself was absent, having travelled north to confer with Lord Tyrone, and by letter knew there would be no pardon for him. His fight turned to guerilla strikes and desperate measures. In a last attempt to protect his people, he hid three hundred women, children, and elderly on Dursey Island. The English found them. They were bound back-to-back, thrown from cliffs, shot as they fell. The Dursey massacre was seared into the memory of Beara, a grief that salted the air and shadowed every step of the journey that followed.

With his fortresses lost and his people slaughtered, Dónal Cam gathered those that remained. Close to a thousand souls - soldiers, attendants, women, children, the old and the frail - set out from Beara on the last day of 1602, hoping to reach O’Neill in Ulster. Their march would cover five hundred kilometres in a fortnight, through Munster, Connacht, and into Ulster, with English forces and Irish allies hounding them at every turn.

It was the dead of winter, the land locked in ice and storm. Hunger stalked them. They ate the flesh of the horses that died along the way, leaves, whatever roots they could dig from the frozen ground. They trudged through mountains rimed with frost, valleys drowned in mist, rivers swollen and fierce. At night they huddled round embers, telling stories to keep despair at bay. Rival clans, fearing reprisal or seeking favour, turned against them. They met closed gates, hostility, betrayal. Deadly volleys cut through the snow, kin striking at kin. Some were taken, some slaughtered, leaving grief heavy in the survivors’ mouths.

When they reached the Shannon, the river rose against them. For two days they worked by torchlight, lashing hazel rods and hides into a frail boat that could carry only a score at a time across the half kilometre of freezing current. Ice clutched their limbs, the water dragged bodies beneath. Many never surfaced. Those who made it across spoke of it as passing from death back into life - baptised by hardship, forged by the river’s rage.

At the end of two weeks, the survivors staggered into Leitrim. They were not victorious, but hollowed, souls worn and scoured. Of nearly a thousand who began, only thirty-five remained alive - eighteen soldiers, sixteen horseboys, and one woman. The others - children, elders, families - had fallen to cold, hunger, or violence along the way. It was not only warriors who died on that road, but innocents too. And yet those thirty-five stood as proof that the spirit of Beara was not broken. The O’Rourkes received them with honour, for they arrived not merely as survivors but as legends, etched by endurance into the memory of Ireland.

Dónal Cam sought to rally with the northern chiefs, but the Treaty of Mellifont ended the war. With the cause lost, he sailed into exile, finding refuge in Spain under the crown that had once sent aid to Kinsale. There he lived until his death in 1618. His march remains one of the most haunting journeys in Irish history - a passage not only across land, but through fire, water, storm, and grief. Today, the Beara–Breifne Way traces his path, a long-distance trail across Ireland where walkers still follow the line of that winter march, step by step into memory.

And still, in West Cork, the land speaks. The famine ridges carved into the hillsides remind us of hunger enforced not only by blight but by empire. The coves remember the French fleet that sought to land at Bantry Bay in 1796, and the ships that never made it still lie beneath the water to this day. The shoreline remembers the gun runners, the whispers of rebellion carried ashore in the dark. The fields remember Michael Collins, born of this soil, and the rebels who struck at empire with cunning and fire. The people remember the Black and Tans, the English death squads sent into Ireland in the early 1920s to crush the fight for independence. And beyond them, the land remembers the long war in the North - the unfinished struggle for freedom carried forward into living memory.

But deeper still is the remembering of the land itself. In every standing stone, every ogham mark, every circle aligned to solstice, the old traditions endure. The dance is still alive. The music is still alive. The language is still alive. The story is still alive. And at the heart of it all, the Cailleach still walks, her presence stitched through hill and harbour, reminding us that this is a land of resilience, resistance, and renewal.

The march of O’Sullivan Beare is not just a tale of survival. It is a current running still through Beara and Bantry Bay, through stone and storm and sea. It is the spirit of the Rebel County itself - unbroken, unbowed, alive as flame in the storm, as stone in the earth, as tide in the bay. And it is more than history. In a world where people are still driven from their homes, where hunger, exile, and war uproot millions, this story matters still. It is a testament to endurance, to human resilience, and to the unyielding will to resist despair. Remembering O’Sullivan Beare is remembering that even in the darkest winter, people can hold to one another and walk on.

Above is a graphic illustration of the Siege of Dunboy Castle from Pacata Hibernia or A History of the Wars in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth first published in 1633.

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