| Details: | “Take great care not to fall upon the coast of Ireland, because of the harm that may come to you there.”
...Sadly, even though the warning was prophetic, the magnitude of the suffering and loss experienced by the wildly buffeted ships, crews and soldiers, could never have been imagined. The scale of the suffering and death during constant storms, offshore, on the jagged rocks and beaches around the coast of Scotland and Ireland was even more incomprehensible. For those who were lucky to be washed or wrecked ashore, and captured, the orgy of slaughter that ensued against these helpless surrendered men on the shores of Ireland was horrific. Surely there can be little temptation adapting a sympathetic view towards their executioners in historic hindsight, or to fall back on that well worn cowardly phrase, ’sure it was the times that were in it’.
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All that the centuries can show are mounds and piles of stones that local people would call, Tuama na Spaineach, (Spaniards Grave), essentially, mass burial places. Not unlike the hundreds of Cillíns, similar mounds littered around catholic Ireland, that mind the remains of the unholy children and their unwed mothers in unconsecrated and unkept common ground. Also common, but unlucky to die before being baptized by a local priest, they too were left with No Stone - No Shame.
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