Donal Cam's march

There are retreats that end an order and there are retreats that preserve it. The first leaves a name on a treaty; the second leaves a name on the ground walked. When a lordship has lost its harbours, its castles, its cattle and its winter, what remains to be saved is not the country but the people who carry the country in their bones, and the man who decides to walk them out becomes, in that act, the last office of the house he was born to.

THE LORD OF BEARA

Domhnall Cam Ó Súileabháin Béarra was forty-one years old in the winter of 1602, lord of the peninsula of Beara on the south-west tip of Munster, the longest finger of Ireland reaching into the Atlantic. The Nine Years' War had been lost at Kinsale a year before. The Spanish had sailed home. Through the spring and summer the English under Carew had taken his strongholds one by one: Dunboy in June, blown up by its own powder with Richard MacGeoghegan dying on the magazine; Dursey in the same week, its garrison and its women thrown from the cliffs into the sea. By Christmas his cattle had been driven off, his harbour at Bantry blockaded, his country burnt to the heather. He had at Glengarriff a thousand of his people, soldiers, women, children, priests, the smiths and the fishermen and the old men who had served his father. He had no fortress left to hold them in. To the north, beyond two hundred and fifteen Irish miles of garrisoned country, lay Leitrim and the protection of Brian Óg Ó Ruairc, who was still in arms. On the last day of December he gave the order to march.

THE SHANNON AT PORTUMNA

It is the eleventh of January 1603. He stands on the south bank of the Shannon at Portumna and the river is wider than any sea-loch he has crossed in his life. The water runs grey and fast under a low sky. Twelve days out of Glengarriff. Behind him, on the road from Loughrea four miles south, half a company of English foot, perhaps eighty men, will come up by sundown. There is winter dark at four o'clock. He has, on this bank, the survivors. There were a thousand at Glengarriff. There are perhaps two hundred and fifty here. The rest are at Aughrim three nights ago, where the Galway country rose against them in the encirclement and they fought through but left the women and the smaller children in the snow because none of them could hold the pace. The fishermen of Beara are cutting willow from the bushes along the bank. They have one horse, killed yesterday at the foot of the Slieve Aughty hills, killed for the meat and the hide and not in that order. The hide is for the boats.

A SECOND OF TIME AT THE BANK

The fishermen kneel in the mud and lash willow with the leather thongs the men have carried since Bantry, and Domhnall Cam stands above them and does the arithmetic that a lord does when the lordship has come down to a count of crossings. The boats hold five. The river is two cable-lengths wide. A round trip is twelve minutes. Four hours of usable light. Twenty crossings. A hundred over. Two hundred and fifty on the bank. He cannot get more than half across. He turns this in his mind the way a man turns a coin he has known the weight of since boyhood, and at the bottom of the turning is the question that no instruction from his father, no rule of the brehons, no Latin of his household priest has ever prepared him to answer, which is not whether to cross but in what order. The priests cross with the children, he thinks, and the thought arrives already in the cadence of a command. The non-combatants first. The soldiers last. And then the colder calculation, because he knows what is on the road from Loughrea: half of us spend the night on this bank in the open with eighty English foot two miles up the road, and they are not the half I came out of Glengarriff to save. Eileen, his wife, daughter of MacCarthy Reagh, will go in the third boat with the priest and the three children. He himself will be in the last boat, with whoever is left at the rope. He gives the order. The boats are four by the first hour and eight by the second. The men cross five to a boat, each carrying a child or an old woman in his lap, the soldiers swimming alongside and pushing the gunwales through the current.

THE LAST BOAT

He stands on the south bank for four hours and counts the crossings off on the cord of his sword-belt, one knot for each round, the way a fisherman counts a catch. The light goes. He puts Eileen in the third boat himself. He does not embrace her on the bank; there is no time and she would not want it watched. The boats come back lighter than they go and each return is a small mercy. By the twentieth crossing the wind has come up and the willow frames are working at the lashings. He makes the last crossing with two soldiers and the rope, and as the boat pulls clear of the south bank the English horse comes up over the rise from the Loughrea road. The hundred and ten left on the bank are taken before sundown. The Beara fishermen who built the boats are mostly in the hundred and ten. They had finished their work and they had not asked to be put in a boat.

THE WALK NORTH

From Portumna they walked three more days through Roscommon and into Leitrim. There was a skirmish at Boyle and they fought through it. They lost perhaps another sixty to cold and to exhaustion and to the country people who picked off the stragglers for what could be stripped from a body. On the evening of the fourteenth of January 1603, fifteen days out of Glengarriff, they came to the gates of Leitrim Castle. Brian Óg Ó Ruairc opened them. Thirty-five walked through. Eighteen were soldiers. One was Eileen MacCarthy. One was the household priest. The rest were the hardest of the thousand, those whose bodies had held. A further hundred or so came in afterwards, in ones and twos, having become separated on the line. The remainder lay in unmarked graves between Glengarriff and Leitrim, the longest grave in seventeenth-century Ireland.

THE COMPENDIUM

His cousin Philip Ó Súileabháin Béarra, who had been a boy on the march and was sent to Spain afterwards to be educated, set the story down at Lisbon in 1621 in the Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, the standard Catholic-Irish narrative of the Tudor wars. He wrote it in Latin because Latin was the surviving language of a Catholic Europe to which his cousin's people had been carrying themselves all along; the march, in his telling, is the march of a people out of a burning country into the keeping of the Church, and the count at the gate of Leitrim is given verbatim. The book preserved what no English chancery would have written down: the names of the dead, the order of the crossings, the prayer said over the horse before it was killed. Donal Cam himself sailed for Spain later in 1603. Philip III raised him to the nobility as Conde de Birhaven. He was killed at Madrid in July 1618 in a street quarrel with an English-born exile named John Bathe, struck down outside a church. His descendants, the Súlibanes of Cádiz and Galicia, kept the title into the eighteenth century.

THE WAY

A lordship is a roof, and when the roof is gone the lord is whoever is still counting heads at the door. What was saved at Portumna was not a peninsula and not a title; it was the strand of memory that runs from a Munster shore to a Leitrim gate, and from there into a Latin book printed at Lisbon, and from there into the bone-knowledge of every Beara family that left for Spain and for Newfoundland and for Boston in the centuries after. The Beara-Breifne Way is waymarked now over five hundred kilometres from Glengarriff to Blacklion along the line Domhnall Cam walked. Hikers cover it in stages most of the year. At the crossing point of the Shannon at Portumna, where the willow still grows along the bank, there is a plaque.