The Battle of Moira, also known as the Battle of Magh Rath, was fought in the summer of AD 637 near the village of Moira in what would become County Down, though some commentators place it a few miles outside Newry in the vicinity of the townlands of Sheeptown and Derrylecklagh near the ancient rath known as the Crown Mound. The conflict pitted the High King of Ireland, Domnall II, against his own foster son Congal Caech, King of Ulaid, who had enlisted the support of Domnall Brecc, King of Dal Riata. The quarrel between the two men had deep roots: Congal himself had cleared the path for Domnall's rise by defeating and killing the previous High King, Suibne Menn, yet the two had swiftly become bitter rivals, clashing already at the Battle of Dun Ceithirn in 629, after which Congal fled to Scotland to seek allies.
Congal returned from Scotland in 637 with a remarkably diverse army. His Dal Riata allies brought with them Scots, Picts, Anglo-Saxons and Britons, including Welshmen, in addition to native Irish forces drawn from Ulaid. The two sides each reportedly numbered around 50,000 men, meeting on the march as Congal moved south from his probable landing point near Dunseverick and Domnall II moved north from Tara. According to Sir Samuel Ferguson, the fighting lasted an entire week, at the end of which the defeated forces fled towards the woods of Killultagh. Congal Caech was killed in the course of the battle, and Domnall Brecc was forced to retreat northward to his own kingdom's holdings.
The consequences of the battle were far-reaching. With Congal dead, the ambitions of Dal nAraidi and its local allies to reverse the High King's advances were permanently frustrated, and the Ulaid were compelled to accept the gains Domnall had made, though they were not wholly subjugated. For Dal Riata the blow was even more severe, as the land defeat at Moira coincided with a naval defeat the very same day at the Battle of the Mull of Kintyre, where the High King's fleet defeated the Dal Riata fleet. The double disaster allowed the High King's forces to occupy Dal Riata lands in north Antrim, left entirely unprotected. In the longer term the battle secured the dominance of the Ui Neill dynasty in the north of Ireland, a dominance their descendants would assert over at least part of that territory until the Flight of the Earls in 1607.
The most arresting confirmation of the battle's legendary scale came not from any medieval manuscript but from the navvies of the nineteenth century. When the Ulster Railway was being constructed through Moira, the excavations turned up the remains of thousands of men and horses buried in the ground beneath the townland. Given that the survivors of such a battle would have carried off many of their dead and that great numbers escaped the field entirely, the sheer volume of skeletal remains uncovered by the railway works gave compelling physical witness to the ancient tradition that this was the largest battle ever fought on the island of Ireland.
Thousands of men and horses confirmed by skeletal remains uncovered during nineteenth-century railway construction at Moira; precise figures not recorded.
Approximately 50,000 men on either side, totalling around 100,000 combined, according to the sources. The Dal Riata force included Scots, Picts, Anglo-Saxons and Britons.
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