Irish Sword, Vol. XII, No. 46, Summer 1975, p 55.
The French are on the sea …
A Military History of Killiney Bay from 1793 to 1815[*]
By Pól Ó Duibhir
From The Irish Sword, Vol. XII No. 46, Summer, 1975
There is no part of the King’s dominions so much exposed to the attempts of the Enemy in this War as Ireland is, and of all Ireland the part most exposed is its Capital.[1]
This opinion was expressed in 1794-5 by the Hon. George Napier, a colonel in the British army.[2] Since the beginning of the war between Britain and France in 1793 both political and military leaders feared a French attack on the British Isles, and what better place to attack than Ireland? The French held many ports along the Dutch coast, and as a consequence the greater part of the British fleet was stationed in the North Sea. If a westerly wind persisted for a period of four or five days the French fleet could sail from Brest and reach Dublin before the British could left a finger to defend the capital. The same wind which would bring the French ships to Dublin would effectively keep whatever British ships were stationed at Portsmouth or Plymouth cooped up in these ports. Napier wrote:
Killiney Bay, the place best calculated for Disembarkation, is a firm sandy dry Beach where 1,500 men at least together with field pieces might be landed at once at any time of tide, not up to their knees in water, and possession of the heights overlooking Dublin taken, before 800 soldiers of the Garrison could be disentangled from the Town and thrown into any position even half way between the Enemy and Dublin.[3]
He feared that the rabble would welcome the French and plunder the city and that “the whole Kingdom would be undone for a Century to come”.
In order to cope with this threat, Napier proposed that about a third of the army be devoted to the defence of the capital, starting with Killiney Bay, where a camp should be set up for 5000 men.[4]
This camp would have to be sufficiently inland to be out of range of the guns of the invading ships. The range of bomb ketches at anchor in the bay would be a full two Irish miles. He also suggested that the army assemble a small corps of enlisted artificers to construct earthworks and such like.[5]
The Viceroy, Lord Camden, accepted Napier’s advice and by early 1795 he was planning to establish camps. The Loughlinstown camp was opened on 1 June that year on the townland of Lehaunstown which was owned by the Established Church and situated about a mile inland.[6] Despite the couple of months training they received, the troops at Loughlinstown were still unable to put on a display for the lord lieutenant by August.[7] This is not surprising given the apparent coming and going of regiments in the camp.[8] During the year that followed, however, they were given intensive training to cope with whatever emergency that might arise; conducting night operations, meeting daybreak alarms and surprise attacks, and repelling landings.[9] John Ferrar who visited the camp in 1796, was full of praise for the way in which the officers were seeing to the comfort of the men.[10] He was disquieted, however, by one aspect of the men’s conduct:
… sporting in profane oaths with the tremendous name of the Supreme being … a crime which is the hellish offspring of practical atheism and heathenish insolence; a crime that brings neither profit, honour, nor pleasure to the profane wretch who commits it; a crime for which he may be put to open shame, forced to appear before a magistrate, and sent for ten days to the house of correction, unless he pays an ignominious fine; and what is more awful still, a crime, which, if persisted in, will one day cause him to gnaw his impious tongue in the severest torments.[11]
In December 1796 the French attempted a landing at Bantry Bay and this increased the authorities’ fear of a seaborne invasion. Lord Carhampton, commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland, decided to draw up a plan to defend Killiney Bay against the French fleet. He asked Major La Chaussée to reconnoitre the bay and draw up a plan of defence. La Chaussée was a Frenchman who appears to have joined the British army following the French Revolution.[12] He submitted his report to Carhampton on 11 February 1797. The report is very clear and written in extremely stylish French.
Although Carhampton requested information on particular points, La Chaussée drew up a comprehensive report on the geography of the bay and its military significance. La Chaussée identified three places which would suit an enemy trying to land. These were the points where there were breaks in the cliffs. He considered the bay had one great advantage, however; it was almost a straight line, and so the attackers could not push the defenders out to the perimeter, and the defenders would not have to spread their forces any wider than those of the attackers.
It is worth summarising La Chaussée’s report as it adds a new dimension to this scenic bay and it also illustrates the concise mind of the professional soldier. La Chaussée included a map with his report but, unfortunately, this does not appear to have survived.[13]
I. The Coast
The coastline is bordered by cliffs, varying in height from 20 to 70 feet, except in three places:
(i)between the bottom of the Obelisk Mountain (Killiney Hill) and the Lime Kiln[14] - a distance of 300 yards.
(ii)at the mouth of the stream which runs across the brow of the camp (Shanganagh River) – a distance of 400 yards.
(iii)at the mouth of the Dargle – a distance of 600 yards – and from there to the mountain of Bray Head.
as well as these three places there are other small breaks in the cliffs caused by little streams or made by local residents for the convenience of access to the beach.
2. Inland
The hinterland of the bay is shaped like an amphitheatre stretching back to the hills, but three major divisions can be identified:
(i)from the Obelisk Mountain to the wood at Fair View (a distance of 2 ½ miles). This section forms a large basin, about one mile wide at its lowest point. There are no natural barriers in this section to impede the progress of the enemy should he succeed in penetrating the coastal defences.
(ii)from Fair View wood to Bray village (a distance of 1½ miles). This section is made up entirely of two fairly regular slopes the summit of which is about 500-700 yards from the sea. The first of these slopes towards the sea in a very gently incline and the second a little steeper towards the Bray to Dublin highway. The coastal slope is fairly open, but the inland one is broken by a considerable number of ditches, slopes, streams etc., all of which make communication and access very difficult.
(iii)from bray village to the foot of the mountain called bray Head (a distance of ¾ mile). This section is fairly regular; the coast is low on the seaward side and it rises in the form of a crater, the centre of which is occupied by a fairly large castle, surrounded by trees and walls.
3. Deployment of Forces
This will depend on:
(i)the number and type of the troops.
(ii)the degree to which they are experienced in battle.
(iii)the geography of the area’
(iv)the general’s choice between engaging the enemy on a broad front or at selected points.
Having taken these points into account, the actual deployment of forces will depend on the judgement of the general on the spot. Military theory does not provide a definite answer to this question.
4. Modifications to the Coastline
(i)position the batteries to cover the sea and defend the approaches from the shore; even if these are not sufficient to prevent disembarkation, the loss they will occasion to the enemy will mean that much less to be contended with when he lands.
(ii)set up 12-pounders or howitzers, hidden behind the shoulders of the cliffs, not to be fired until the very moment when the enemy start getting out of their launches. I think that these flanking batteries would cause chaos among the enemy as they could not be fired upon from the ships due to the presence of the enemy’s own troops in the line of fire.
(iii)escarp all the slopes and ravines which leave openings in the cliff in order to reduce to a minimum those points where the enemy can get through and in this way keep him longer exposed to the raking fire, should he disembark in front of the cliffs.
5. Inland Modifications
(i)cut and destroy all the hedges, ditches and ravines which are parallel to the shore and so give the enemy cover and allow him to advance unnoticed.
(ii)entrench the country houses and fortify them with big guns
(iii)set up barricades (?) at the top of the pathways to deny the enemy entry for as long as possible should he try to penetrate the defences at any one of these points.
The troops for all this defence would, of course, be drawn from the Loughlinstown Camp.
Despite these preparations the French never came in 1797 and the Loughlinstown troops were not called on to defend the bay. But towards the end of 1797 and the beginning of 1798 the camp was the focal point for another quite different plan. The camp contained a large number of catholic militia and the United Irishmen planned to subvert these, take over the camp and use the troops to march on Dublin. This was a clever and ambitious scheme which would have provided the revolutionaries with trained forces and deprived the city of its main defence at one blow. The scheme was thwarted, however, as a result of the admission of Capt. John Armstrong to the United Irishmen. Armstrong was in charge of the King’s County Regiment stationed at Loughlinstown and met regularly with the Sheares brothers in Dublin to work out details of the plan against the camp.[15] After each of these meetings, however, he reported to Dublin Castle and kept the authorities fully informed on the latest developments. In July 1798 he testified against the Sheares brothers at their trial, part of the charge being that they “did make … a plan … to surprise and take the camp at Lehaunstown …”[16]
By April 1799 the life of the camp was at an end. The authorities were satisfied that there was no further danger from the united Irishmen, now that the rebellion had been quelled, and the French who had landed in the west with Humbert had been defeated. Indeed after 1800 Anglo-French hostilities were minimal and the treaty of Amiens in 1802 brought about a temporary peace.
However, when war broke out afresh in 1803, the authorities again began to fear a French seaborne invasion. A plan was drawn up to construct a series of martello towers around the coast of Ireland and the south coast of England. Since Ireland was uppermost in the minds of the authorities the first towers were build in this country, starting with the southern half of Dublin Bay. Seven were build on the coast of Killiney Bay and a further seven between Dalkey Island and the city.[17] Each tower cost about £1,800[18] and was, at first, garrisoned by six to eight men.[19] By 1815 each tower appears to have had a garrison of about thirty men and the batteries about forty-five men. The towers were generally mounted with one gun while the batteries had, on average, three to four guns. These numbers were subsequently reduced when the French threat was removed after Waterloo, though some gunners, pensioners perhaps, are recorded as living in the towers as late as 1867.[20]
The accompanying map shows the concentration of these defences around the points identified by La Chaussée as coastal weaknesses. Tower no. 4 was not situated at a weak point but was, presumably, constructed to maintain continuity and fire-cover. The range of the guns on the towers or batteries was about one mile and it was a generally accepted rule that the fields of fire should overlap for maximum effectiveness.
There is some doubt as to whether No. 5 was a tower or battery or both, but, given the practice of numbering at least some of the batteries in the towers series (e.g. No. 8 Limekiln Battery, No. 9 Dalkey Island Tower and Battery), it is reasonable to suppose that the present ruined battery in Shanganagh was in fact No. 5, though it may have been originally accompanied by a tower. Joyce[21] Suggests that this battery was constructed in the wrong place as the ground rises in front of it to seaward and obscures the view of invading vessels. Much of the cliffs here have collapsed since the early 1800s, but the 1837 Ordnance Survey map (sheet 26) shows that the land did rise even higher in front of the battery than present inspection of the site would suggest. However, in view of La Chaussee’s tactic of hiding guns behind the shoulder of the cliffs and holding fire till the enemy were on the beach, it seems that this battery was in fact correctly located and that its location made sense in military terms.
[*] A slightly shorter version of this essay won first prize in the local history competition in the 1974 Oireachtas and I would like to than the Oireachtas for permission to reuse the material in an English language version.
[1] Kevin Murray, “the Defence of Dublin, 1794-5” in Ir. Sword, ii 333
[2] The then editor of the Ir. Sword considered Colonel the Hon. George Napier MRIA (1751-1804), father of Sir Charles James Napier (1782-1853) the famous conqueror of Sind, the most likely author of the manuscript from which the above quotation is taken. He served with the earl of Moira’s force which was to cooperate with the French Royalists in La Vendée and which joined the army of the duke of York at Mechelen in July 1794. On 25 August of that year he was appointed lieut.-colonel of the newly raised Londonderry Regiment which was broken up and drafted to the West Indies the following year. He was then made “chief field engineer” on the staff of Lord Carhampton, commander-in –chief in Ireland. Col. Napier fortified his house at Celbridge, Co. Kildare in 1798 and defended it against the insurgents (Ir. Sword, ii, 332-3).
[3]Ibid., 333.
[4]Ir. Sword, ii, 336.
[5]Ibid., 337.
[6] Henry McAnally, The Irish Militia, 1793-1816 (Dublin 1949), 79; John Ferrar, A view of ancient and modern Dublin, with its improvements to the year 1796 (Dublin 1796), 124. Ferrar records that the campsite was capable of holding 20,000 men.
[7]Hibernian Journal 14 August 1795. Quoted in McAnally, 83.
[8] There is some doubt as to what regiments were in the camp at any given time. Ferrar (op. cit.) gives the following list from June 1795 to April 1796: Breadalbane Fencible Highlanders – 860 men; Downshire Militia – 760; Westmeath Militia – 540; Derry Militia – 600; Fermanagh Militia, replaced after a month by the Longford Militia – 480’ Drogheda Militia – 280; Essex Fencibles – 550; Aberdeen Fencibles, succeeding the Westmeath and Drogheda Militia, - 600; Argyle Fencibles, succeeded by the Inverness Fencibles – 700; Royal Irish Artillery – 200; Donegal Militia – 700; Clare Militia, succeeding the Aberdeen Fencibles – 460. On this basis there would have been some 5,300 men in the camp in April 1796 or shortly thereafter. It is strange however that Ferrar does not mention the Perthshire Fencibles who are recorded in the Sentimental and Masonic Magazine, June 1795 (quoted in McAnally, 80) as having been among the first four regiments to occupy the camp. On 3 December 1795 the Freeman’s Journal (quoted in Kevin Murray, “The Loughlinstown Camp”, in Dublin Hist. Rec., vii, 26) records that there were 2,000men in the camp. Ferrar records 4,000 for August 1795 (127) and if one adds the numbers in the Westmeath, Downshire and Drogheda Militia (1,580 men) and the Perthshire Fencibles (400?) which regiments were already in the camp in June 1795, according to the article quoted above then there would appear to have been some 2,000 men in the camp at the outset. Numbers in the camp in the first year appears as follows: June 1795 – 2,000 (Sentimental and Masonic Magazine); Aug. 1795 – 4,000 (Ferrar, 127); Dec. 1795 – 2000 (Freeman’s Journal, 3 December 1795); Apr. 1796 – 5,300 (implied in Ferrar, 126-7).
[9]Freeman’s Journal, 20 August 1796 and 24 November 1796 (Quoted in McAnally, 96).
[10] Ferrar, 125.
[11]Ibid.,130-1. It is worth recording here Ferrar’s view of the increased efficiency of the British army (p. 128):
Here it will not appear misplaced to record the present good management of the British army. The Commander in chief is a friend to soldiers, to their widows and children. He constantly studies their comfort and convenience. His Royal Highness has dismissed those young boys for whom interest had got commissions, as for sinecure places. He has abolished the practice of raising men for rank, by which many an inexperienced stripling, who had money, stepped over the brave old veteran. He has reformed and consolidated the army into effective battalions of 1,000 men each, by which means a vast saving has been made in the pay of useless officers. Long service or professional merit is sure to meet his protection.