Siege of Smerwick 1580

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The Siege of Smerwick, during the Desmond Rebellions, took place at Dún an Óir in 1580 is one of the most infamous massacres of the Sixteenth Century in Ireland. James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald landed a small Papal invasion force in July 1579, initating the Second Desmond Rebellion, but was killed only a month afterward.

The landing did provoke a war that lasted for three years. In September 1580, another expeditionary force of 600 - mostly Italian -troops landed at Smerwick to aid the rebels, and were garrisoned at Dún an Óir, a fort that they constructed from earth in the new Italian style. Within days their ships had been seized by an English naval force under the command of William Winter. At the same time, crown forces under the lord deputy, Arthur, Baron Grey de Wilton, and the Earl of Ormond prevented rebel Geraldine forces from linking up with the landing force. Grey prosecuted the siege with a bombardment of heavy naval cannon, and after two days the Italian commander, Bastiano di San Giuseppi, surrendered without condition. Grey took away the troops' armour and weapons, penned them inside the fort, and "fell straight to execution. There were 600 slain".

Most of the prisoners were beheaded in a nearby field over two days, including women and children, and it appears that many of the bodies were thrown in the sea. Today that field is known in the locality as Gort a Ghearradh (the Field of the Cutting) while the field where the heads were buried bears the name Gort na gCeann (the Field of the Heads). In the early years of the 21st Century many skeletons have been revealed with the effect of coastal erosion[1]