The Flight of the Earls

I am now updating the blog well into the future. Thinking back to this day, my big accomplishment was extracting my winter clothes and shoes from the various cubbyholes where they spend the summer and inserting them into the closet and drawers recently vacated by summer clothes, which then get secreted away into the boxes and suitcases I have stashed around the house. I feel like a squirrel with a weakness for out-of-date fashion. I don’t have a basement, garage, or attic, just a crawl space. So I dread this bent-double, biannual chore.

I’ll take this opportunity to put up some photos I took way back in July near Rathmullan. I didn’t realise Rathmullan was the site of the famous 1607 Flight of the Earls, described in these roadside signs. My Wiki-based understanding is the English very cleverly turned one kinsman against another in the Gaelic clans--a jealous brother or cousin, whatever. And during the course of the Nine Years' War, the larger, better armoured English army wore down the militias of the various clans. Which lead to the flight of the Gaelic ruling class in the north. And subsequently to the Plantation of the north--tens of thousands of acres of land awarded to English generals and noblemen, who then imported Scottish labourers to work the lands. This was the genesis of the Troubles, as the Protestant Ascendancy emmiserated the native people of Ireland.

The quotation from the Annals of the Four Masters is quite lovely. The annals were compiled by a Franciscan monk and three other scholars in the 1630s.

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