On Sunday 12th July 1691 (Old Style) a 20,000 strong Jacobite army (shown in green on map) commanded by a French officer, Lieut-General the Marquis de St Ruth, stood at a defensive position stretching over one and a half miles along the ridge of Aughrim; so-called from it’s shape [Each Dhroim or Horse’s Back] To the north- across a ‘bogg’ [which at the time usually referred to a marsh rather than a turf bog -east was an army of comparable size (shown in orange) commanded for King William by the Dutch General Godard van Reede Baron de Ginkel He had twelve or thirteen battalions of English, three Ulster battalions, six Danish, three Dutch and three battalions of French Huguenots.
What followed was the bloodiest battle in Irish history. By nightfall about 7,000 men lay dead or dying on or about Aughrim Hill (the present-day townlands of Attidermot and Kilcommadan) and from its summit next day the scattered corpses ‘looked like a great flock of sheep’. The course of the battle may be briefly described; two Williamite attacks on the left and middle of the Jacobite position (‘1 and ‘2’ on the map) were beaten back. A third attack across a narrow causeway close by Aughrim Castle consolidated a bridgehead, St. Ruth was decapitated by cannon shot, the Jacobite cavalry at Luttrell’s Pass melted away, and Williamite horsemen poured across and veered south to the left. They swept along the ridge riding down the Irish foot soldiers. The heaviest butchery of the day happened here; George Story, a Williamite chaplain, noted that blood ‘so inundated the fields that you could hardly take a step without slipping’. For over a year, thousands of bodies were left where they fell. After all these superlatives, second-biggest, bloodiest, the military significance of Aughrim need not be laboured. It is a byword for disaster; ‘that is where Aughrim was lost’. Aughrim ended, at a blow the Irish Catholic hopes of regaining lost land and breaking away from the domination of Westminster and determined the political order for the next two centuries.
