A largely overlooked painting in a back staircase in Trinity College Dublin offers an invaluable guide to archaeologists excavating the site of the 1601 Battle of Kinsale, writes Hiram Morgan
One of the great things about conferences is the many spin-offs they have - often the consequence of drinking late into the night. During the Kinsale Winter School organised in January 2002 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the battle, I had the good fortune to meet Damian Shiels, an enthusiastic young archaeologist, with an interest in digging up battlefields. He ended up writing a chapter in the subsequent book of essays about the possibility of doing the same for Kinsale. As a result also, the Kinsale Battlefield Project was established to find what remained of that fateful military action which saw Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, and the army of Gaelic Ireland trounced by the forces of the crown under Lord Deputy Mountjoy.
Although not designated - partly because there are no above-ground remains - as a monument, most of the battlefield fortunately lies behind the hills overlooking Kinsale. However, the town's population has increased by 15 per cent in the last five years and it is now advancing over the hills out of sight of the much cherished sea-view. We had to get our skates on. Almost immediately Joseph Carey, the Cork-based philanthropist who is sponsoring the project, sent Damian and fellow archaeologist Paul O'Keeffe up in a light aircraft to photograph the area. This information continues to prove fruitful, but the most important material has been contemporary evidence culled not only from documents but from maps as well.
When Bord Fáilte erected signposts in the late 1950s to indicate the main points of interest relating to the battlefield, it did so with the assistance of an engraved map published in Pacata Hibernia in 1633. In doing so their experts had ignored a large painting brought over from England in 1784 which has since hung largely unstudied on a back staircase in Trinity College Dublin. The cataloguers of Trinity's art collection assert that the Pacata engraving was the source of the painting but in the course of illustrating the commemorative volume it became obvious to me that the painting had far more detail. In other words, the engraving was made from the pre-existing painting, not vice versa and, being necessarily more simplified in format, many details of the local topography such as hedges, ditches, paths and streams were lost.
THE MORE YOU examine Trinity's Kinsale painting, the more you realise how remarkably accurate it is. This vast oil painting (173cm x 211cm) was executed from a bird's-eye perspective. From the unenclosed hilly land between Belgooly and Dunderrow stretched across the bottom of the painting, the viewer looks southwards into the distance across a medieval field system toward the harbour and town of Kinsale and the mouth of the Bandon river placed at the top of the painting. Onto this landscape the artist has painted, with captions, the main actions of the siege and battle of Kinsale. It was plainly done by a skilled cartographer in the days and weeks after the battle whilst the English forces stayed in situ awaiting the evacuation of the Spaniards from the town. This remarkable painting has become the key to digging up the battlefield.
The first insight gleaned from it was the existence of an ancient ringfort, which though not featured in the Pacata engraving, shows up on the ordnance survey map and is scheduled as a monument. The Trinity painting placed this rath across a roadway from Thomond's second camp - the most forward English position - and which it depicted being furiously attacked by a Spanish sally from the town. As a result we were able to identify a site worth exploring. With the permission of the landowner and the necessary archaeological licence, Damian and Paul assembled a team of volunteers from all over Ireland and from as far afield as Scandinavia on the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2006.
Metal-detecting at the side of a 19th-century farm house, we found our first musket balls - we had discovered Thomond's encampment roughly co-terminous with the existing farm buildings and just in time, as the place is now being developed for housing. Having identified Thomond's fort using the Trinity painting, the project had now established its utility and was able to use it for orientation purposes generally. The road system it showed mapped very well on the existing route network (barring of course the new Cork road which circles round to Kinsale along the coast with the aid of a causeway).
THIS YEAR'S BANK holiday dig was more significant. We were able to target the Lord Deputy's camp which straddled the old Cork-Kinsale road. During the siege and its aftermath, with up to 7,000 men on site, it was temporarily one of the biggest towns in Ireland. And somewhere in the vicinity must be the pits were many of its occupants were buried having died of dysentery and typhus. Mountjoy himself only barely recovered from catching one of the diseases wracking the camp. This time the volunteer team discovered in a green field location 21 lead shot, three coins and a number of buttons. The detection of the buttons and the fact that the balls had not been filed down for shooting was clear indication of an encampment. The next stage here will be to use geo-physical probing of the land to establish more exactly the layout of Mountjoy's camp.
The ultimate object of this project will be to find the location where the Irish were routed and by excavating it to establish scientifically the reasons for their catastrophic defeat. Since the Trinity painting has already proved to be accurate in locating two key positions, it seems that if we follow its guidance faithfully we must now look for the battlefield itself not at Millwater Ford, where Bord Fáilte put up a signpost, but in the vicinity of Ballythomas crossroads on the way to Dunderrow. This would also make sense of the documentary evidence which states that Mountjoy pursued the retreating Tyrone across two streams, whereas to get to Millwater ford he would have had to cross the same stream twice. It also might make more sense of what we know of the battle because Millwater is too cramped an area for the decisive cavalry charge to have taken place.
Who was the remarkable artist/map-maker we should be thanking for the project's success at Kinsale? There is really only one candidate. That is Richard Bartelett, who was employed by Mountjoy to execute watercolour maps and plans of his successful campaigns in the North. Willie Smith, in his recent book, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, talks about Bartelett's brilliance as an artist and cartographer ranging from intimate and deeply symbolic bird's-eye sketches to panoramic map-views depicting whole regions. In which case there is no reason why he should not have been commissioned to do a painting celebrating Mountjoy's crowning success at Kinsale. The depiction of hedges and ditches and of soldiers in bodies and singly are similar in both the Kinsale painting and the Ulster watercolours. The only difference is the lettering in inscriptions, but this may be accounted for by the use of oils in one instance and ink in the other.
THE KINSALE LANDSCAPE is almost as good as what you get from satellite on Google Earth, and is as far I am concerned easily the best topographical painting of its day anywhere in Europe. Why did its artist not execute more such remarkable paintings and hence remained unknown and unheralded? The reason seems plain to me. When Richard Bartelett was mapping Donegal in 1603, "the inhabitants took off his head because they would not have their country discovered".
Whoever painted the battle of Kinsale, Trinity should no longer continue to hide away this wonderful artifact commemorating a decisive moment in Irish history. Furthermore it might reconsider its current labeling, which states that it is "probably an 18th century version of a 17th century painting". This is certainly not the case. It's the original. We know that a painting of the battle of Kinsale was defaced in a royal palace in London in 1620 by members of a Spanish diplomatic delegation when the master ambassador Gondomar was in talks with King James in the adjoining room. In close-up photographs of the bottom-right hand corner of the Trinity painting you can see the slash marks their swords made.
Hiram Morgan is a historian at UCC