Hugh the Hospitable at Coll's Crossroads

Some wars are decided in their council-rooms, by men bent over maps with compasses and clean hands. Others are decided on a strip of bog three horses wide, by two captains who ride into the same morning from opposite ends of a kingdom and discover, in the same instant, that the kingdom is not large enough for both of them.

THE LORD OF THE LAKES

Aodh Mag Uidhir, called Aodh an Fhealsóra by the poets of Fermanagh for the table he kept at Enniskillen, has been lord of the lake-country since his father Cuconnacht went into the ground in 1589. He is about thirty-five, raised inside a house that learned long ago how to live between water and the Crown. Fermanagh is islands and crannogs and timbered halls; Fermanagh is the harpers who eat at his board and the galloglass who sleep along his walls; Fermanagh is the rent-roll of cattle that comes in over the drove-roads each Bealtaine. For eight years now the Maguire has ridden under Ó Néill and Ó Domhnaill in the Confederate war against the Queen's men: at the Ford of the Biscuits, at the Yellow Ford, in the wet country between Blackwater and Erne where a man on a hobby is worth six on an English destrier. He has watched the war creep south. He has watched Munster, broken in the last generation, rise again under the Sugán earl. He knows that whichever side first carries fire into the other's heartland holds the war by the throat.

THE LONG RIDE SOUTH

On the twenty-third of February, with about a hundred horse at his back, he leaves the lake-country. He rides through Roscommon under a cold sky, through Tipperary keeping to the high ground and the bog edges, into north Cork where the Awbeg runs grey between alder and thorn. Three hundred miles of country in eight days, the hobbies short-coupled and willing, the troopers feeding from saddle and ditch. The point of this ride is not plunder. The point is to put a Confederate lance into the back of Sir George Carew, newly arrived as President of Munster, whose business in this spring of 1600 is to dismantle by hanging and by garrison what is left of Gaelic Munster. To strike Carew's officers in Carew's own country is to tell every wavering lord between Mallow and Kinsale that the Queen's writ does not yet run unchallenged here. No Ulster column will ever ride further south in this war. He does not know that. He knows only the next ford, the next dawn, the wet leather of the rein in his hand.

THE BOG-CROSSING

It is twenty past nine on the morning of Wednesday the first of March 1600. The crossing is a causeway through soft ground three miles north of Mallow, the place men of the country call Crois Bhaile Choll. The light is the thin grey light of an Irish March, river-mist lifting off the Awbeg, the hawthorn not yet in leaf. The Maguire is in three-quarter plate over a buff coat, a pair of wheel-lock horse-pistols in the saddle holsters, a broadsword at the belt, ten of his troopers strung out behind him on the narrow road. The horse beneath him is grey, the colour his house has always favoured. Coming up from the south on a Sunday patrol, with his own small escort, is Sir Warham St Leger, fifty-five years old, Marshal of Munster, a man of the old Munster planter stock who has buried friends and kin in this country and means to bury more enemies in it before he is done. Neither party expected the other. The causeway is too narrow to wheel on. The distance closes to a hundred yards, then eighty, then forty.

A SECOND ON THE CAUSEWAY

Between forty yards and ten yards there is time for a man on a cantering horse to think one clean thought and to know he is thinking it. The Maguire knows St Leger by the colours and by the bearing; the Marshal of Munster is the most senior officer of the Crown he will meet on this raid, and to take him here, on Carew's own ground, is to write the whole long ride into the chronicles in a single line. He has the higher seat on the causeway. St Leger has the firmer footing on the bog-edge. The pistols will speak at ten yards, which is the range at which a wheel-lock kills a man in plate or does nothing at all. Behind that calculation, woven through it the way a second voice runs under a harper's air, is the thought of his son. Cú Connacht is twelve. If the Maguire goes down on this causeway the boy inherits Fermanagh in the eighth year of a war that is not yet half-run, and the lake-country passes to a child. There is no reining in. There is no riding round. A chief of Fermanagh on a raid three hundred miles from home does not turn his horse from the Marshal of Munster on a strip of road wide enough for one. He sets his thumb to the dog of the pistol and rides. Aodh an Fhealsóra, who fed poets at Enniskillen, rides at the canter into the only choice the morning has left him.

THE EXCHANGE

At ten yards both men fire. The Maguire's ball takes St Leger in the chest, through the buff and into the heart. St Leger's ball takes the Maguire in the forehead. Both saddles empty almost together. The two escorts come up at the gallop and find their captains on the wet ground, the grey horse standing over its rider, the Marshal's hat in the rushes. Neither man speaks again. The whole action, from the first sight on the causeway to the last breath, runs about five minutes. The escorts disengage; there is no second charge. There is only the work of lifting the two bodies out of the bog-water.

THE TWO ROADS HOME

The Marshal's body goes south, by the road it came, to Cork. On the fourth of March 1600 Sir Warham St Leger is buried in Christ Church Cathedral in the city, with the muffled drum and the trailed pike of a soldier of the Queen, and Sir George Carew writes north that he has lost the best officer of his command. The chief's body goes the other way. His escort, fewer now than they were in February, carry him out of north Cork by night, up through the Galtees, across the Shannon at a quiet ford, through Roscommon under the same cold sky, into Fermanagh at last in the third week of March. They bury him on Devenish Island in Lower Lough Erne, in the ground where Maguires have been laid since before the surname was written down, the round tower watching from the bank.

THE INHERITANCE

Cú Connacht Óg Maguire takes the chieftaincy at twelve. He is at Kinsale in the December of the next year, when the southern wind that the whole war has waited for comes too late and brings the wrong ships. He rides north with Ó Néill out of that ruin. Seven years after his father's death, on the fourteenth of September 1607, he steps aboard a French ship at Rathmullan on Lough Swilly with the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell and ninety others, and the lake-country passes out of Gaelic hands forever. The Penal age that follows will set itself, by statute after statute, to dismantle in law the Catholic and Gaelic Ireland that the Maguires of Fermanagh embodied; the lordship that Aodh defended on the causeway will not return. But the bardic schools, while they last, will keep the story. The mutual kill at the bog-crossing becomes the foundational single combat of the Nine Years' War in the Fermanagh tradition, the cleanest image the poets have of a war that ended in flight and confiscation: two captains meeting at ten yards on a road no wider than a horse, each carrying the other's death in the same instant.

THE CAUSEWAY NOW

Such mornings belong neither to the council-room nor to the chronicle but to the narrow ground between, where a man on a cantering horse meets the one decision a kingdom has left him and answers it in five minutes. On the N73 road three miles north of Mallow, where the Awbeg still runs grey between alder and thorn, a bronze plate set by Fermanagh and Cork together on the four-hundredth anniversary names the two men and the date and lets the bog speak for the rest.