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.

Declan McClare was raised in the Antrim glens whose sixteenth-century wars form the subject of this book, and has spent much of his adult life tracing the family histories, clan lore, and battlefield sites that still mark the north Antrim coastline. A lifelong student of Gaelic and Scoto-Irish history, he has spent years walking the ground at Ballycastle, Knocklayd, and the Glens themselves, gathering the local memory and documentary record that inform his narrative work. He writes with particular attention to the interwoven fortunes of Ireland's Gaelic lordships and their Hebridean neighbours, and to the human cost too often lost beneath the strategic narrative. Blood and Redshanks is his account of the conflict that shaped his own home ground, written in the belief that this remarkable and largely forgotten story deserves to be told in full.