Archaeologists dig up clue to early independence bid
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have made a landmark discovery that could help answer the question that has puzzled Irish historians for over 200 years.
Could an invasion of Ireland by Napoleon’s French forces have succeeded and triggered Irish independence more than century earlier than it was actually won?
A team of experts — led by Rubicon Archaeology — has discovered a near pristine gun emplacement on Bere Island in west Cork.
Not to go all military on an archaeoblog, but the history of such defenses is pretty mixed. They frequently, or usually, got beaten.
The fort has a fixed number of guns. The attacker can, with sufficient planning, always bring enough ships to outgun the fort. The fort has the advantage of protection and fields of fire and the ships have the advantage of superior numbers. The object of the fort is to keep out small numbers of interlopers, meaning an invasion or raid has to be a Big Deal. Big Deals are based on limited resources and so are rarer.
In the situation of the Irish, however, a not-big deal might have sparked a mass movement. But even the Big Deals, such as they were, did not.
Forts suck up guns and shot and powder and keep them in one place for, in some cases, decades without seeing an enemy.
Comment by Richard Aubrey — July 18, 2012 @ 5:34 am