In 1594, an army loyal to Queen Elizabeth marched along a road that led across the Arney River near the town of the same name, about 80 miles west of Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland. Little did they know that they were walking into a large-scale ambush set by a group of Irish chieftains. The Queen’s soldiers were slaughtered and the supplies they were transporting to nearby Enniskillen Castle were dumped into the river. The incident became known as the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits, but after 400 years its location had become a matter of dispute. Scholars believed that the battle had taken place at the Drumane Bridge, about a mile and a half east of town, but the local oral history maintained that it had occurred closer to town, at a site called the Red Meadows. This year archaeologists from the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) worked with the people of Arney to investigate.

“To be honest, I wasn’t that keen to look at [the Red Meadows],” says Paul Logue, an archaeologist with the NIEA. “But when we went, it actually started to seem quite promising.” A closer examination of area maps showed that the Red Meadows was the only dry path through miles of bog, and that it led right to a ford in the river. It was a natural place for an ambush. The team surveyed the Red Meadows with metal detectors and found huge numbers of lead bullets and shot in the ground, clear evidence that they had found their battlefield.

Logue and other archaeologists from the NIEA have been working with the local people for a year on a project called “Battles, Bricks, and Bridges,” which is examining the history of Arney. In a way, the project continues the local tradition of preserving history that has been going on at least since the time of the battle. “Oral history is a way of communities keeping their stories alive,” says Logue, “and that is really what happened with this battlefield.”