Reading through material about the endless English expeditions across the Irish during the second Desmond rebellion - more a war against the culture and peasantry than anything else. A war to depopulate Munster. It is horrendous beyond words.

The killing fields of Ireland, essentially - the Irish peasants were abandoned to the English soldiery who slaughtered them by the tens of thousands.

Pelham who gathered the English forces before their onslaught west made this entirely clear - in his words they had decided to make Munster "as bare a country as ever a Spaniard set his foot in".

The English military commanders carefully planned how to achieve this - the country was to be scoured and left dead by the English. Burned and without people. No one was to be spared. Every few leagues garrisons would be planted, fattened on stolen cattle.