When soldiers of the army of Queen Elizabeth II started digging in for the "Battle of Drumcree" this year, I doubt if they - or anybody else - had a sense of history repeating itself. But in Ireland everything has a historical significance - even ditches. Last Friday, August 14th, it was 400 years to the day since an army of Queen Elizabeth I was virtually annihilated at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, only 15 miles from Drumcree.
In both battles, a force of attackers crashed into a cunningly designed defence centring on a water-filled moat or trench, surmounted by prickly barricades (razor wire today, interwoven thorns called "plashing" in the 16th century). But this time the Crown forces were defending - and they won. In 1598 they were attacking - and they lost.
The battle of The Yellow Ford, fought just a few miles to the north-west of Armagh city, was a key engagement and turning point in the Nine Years War between the Elizabethan state and Hugh O'Neill, last Gaelic prince of Ulster. It was a showdown between brash, Elizabethan imperialism and the centuries-old Gaelic civilization of Ireland. Although the Irish won spectacularly at the Yellow Ford, their triumph proved short-lived in this unequal struggle. Eventual victory in the Nine Years War cost Elizabeth dearly - £2 million and 40,000 lives, making it the Elizabethan equivalent of the Vietnam war.
It was a ferocious struggle fought, for the most part, in the Gaelic heartlands of Ulster, at that time an almost impregnable natural fortress. What wasn't mountain, lake or forest was bog.
The opening move in the war was the English garrison policy of establishing forts and fortified positions in Ulster in order to open up the Gaelic heartlands and progressively weaken areas of possible rebellion. Forts at Sligo, Monaghan, Armagh, Enniskillen and Blackwater extended Elizabethan control in Ulster. But the policy had one major flaw. The forts needed periodic re-supplying along well established routes.
Large-scale ambushes
All the early battles of the Nine Years War were really large-scale ambushes carefully, even meticulously, planned. The quaintly titled Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits in 1594 was an ambush on a supply column attempting to relieve Enniskillen. It got its name from the food supplies jettisoned by the retreating English into the river Arney. Without supplies, forts fell to the insurgent Irish at Sligo, Enniskillen and Blackwater. At Clontibret in 1595, a supply column was ambushed and severely mauled en route to Monaghan. Then, in 1598, the same tactic was employed at the strategically important Blackwater fort.
Possession of the Blackwater commanded the route to Dungannon, O'Neill's base of operations, and gateway to the heartlands of Gaelic Ulster. It was important symbolically too, as a linchpin in the overall struggle for sovereignty that lay at the heart of the Nine Years War: who commanded Ulster, Queen Elizabeth or O'Neill?
Road sealed off
Blackwater fort lay about seven miles north-west of Armagh, mid-way to Dungannon and commanding the only bridge over the Blackwater river. It could easily be reached by road (a luxury in 16th-century Ireland). The problem, as Sir Henry Bagenal - Marshal of the Queen's forces in Ireland and, ironically enough, Hugh O'Neill's brother-in-law - already knew, was that O'Neill's forces had sealed off the road with a series of barricades. Bagenal resolved to outflank O'Neill by heading north and crossing the Callan river downstream, then wheeling his men round to march briskly across open country until they came to the Blackwater. "We should march all through the hard and open champain, saving the passing through one bog some two or three flight-shot over, where we would maintain skirmish with the rebels till the Marshal had made the bog passable with boughs and sticks for the artillery, horse, and carriages."
From that bog oozed a peculiar mud of a yellowish colour, giving the place its name, the Yellow Ford. The route Bagenal chose involved traversing three steep hills in succession. Between the first and second hills lay the Yellow Ford itself, and between the second and third hills lay the main line of O'Neill's fortifications. This, like the one dug this year at Drumcree, comprised a water-filled ditch, three metres wide and 10 metres deep, crowned with a parapet of thorns.
As at Drumcree, the defenders had all the advantages. From their covered position the Irish raked the entire English column with gunfire, before launching sudden, controlled attacks at any gaps that their bombardment had opened. The terrain, the traps and the gunplay combined to dismember the moving column. Hemmed in by the encircling Irish, the column began to break. Panic became general as word came through that Bagenal himself had been killed, shot in the forehead. Retreat turned to rout as the survivors took to its heels, and those who made it back to Armagh became as much hostages in O'Neill's hands as those in the Blackwater fort.
English losses
The English lost 800 men and 25 officers. A further 200 were wounded and 300 listed as "missing" - most of these had deserted to the Irish side during the battle. Irish losses were 200 dead and 400 wounded.
The Irish victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford was a massive body-blow to English rule in Ireland. But it did not transform the guerrilla fighters of O'Neill's Ulster army into a conventional fighting force capable of a set-piece military confrontation. The bitter truth of this was recognised too late at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, a disaster for the Irish which effectively ended the Nine Years War.
Having lost the war, the Gaelic and Catholic inhabitants of Ulster fell victim to a ruthless policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing - perhaps a third of the population was wiped out by war, massacre and famine. In their wake came the Plantation of Ulster.
Despite Ulster's obsession with commemoration, the 400th anniversary of the Yellow Ford has hardly been mentioned. There have been no museum exhibitions, TV and radio documentaries, or guided tours. The history of pre-Plantation Ulster is today largely ignored, and what happened at the Yellow Ford in 1598 is all but forgotten.