Blood and Redshanks: Shane O'Neill, the MacDonnells, and the Battle for Tudor Ulster (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798235986145)

Blood and Redshanks: Shane O'Neill, the MacDonnells, and the Battle for Tudor Ulster

In 1565, a Gaelic chieftain destroyed a Scottish dynasty in a single, unforgettable morning, and then, within two years, was destroyed in turn by the very people he had annihilated.

Blood and Redshanks tells the full, sixty-year story behind the Battle of Glentaisie: the marriage that planted a branch of Clan Donald on Irish soil, the mercenary pipeline that made a family of Hebridean exiles into the masters of the Antrim coast, and the calculating brilliance of Shane O'Neill, who exploited an Easter gathering, a forced march through impassable forest, and his enemy's own thirst to shatter MacDonnell power at dawn. It follows Shane to the summit of Gaelic hegemony and traces, with unflinching detail, his own catastrophic fall, drowned at Farsetmore, murdered at a banquet by the family he had crushed. And it follows Sorley Boy MacDonnell, survivor and prisoner, through two decades of patient, hard-won reconstruction to a triumph the history books rarely tell: not O'Neill's victory, but MacDonnell endurance.

A story of ambition, betrayal, and the long arc of vengeance in Tudor Ulster, told with the narrative force of the best military history writing.