COUNTY FERMANAGH, NORTHERN IRELAND—In 1594, a force loyal to Queen Elizabeth I was traveling to Enniskillen Castle when it was intercepted by Irish chieftain Hugh Maguire at the Arney River. It had been thought that the ensuing Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits, named for the lost English rations that floated down the river, took place at the Drumane Bridge crossing. Local people, however, remembered that this first battle of the Nine Years War took place further upstream. Archaeologists conducted a metal detector survey at the proposed meadow and found sixteenth-century armor-piercing bullets. “Up until right now, for hundreds of years, the battle was meant to be behind us about a mile and a half at Drumane and that’s what I believed as well.…But when we’ve looked at the landscape a bit better, there’s a big massive line of bog for miles along here and there’s one crossing point across that bog if you want to have dry feet, and it leads right to this little ford. What we’ve found are little bullets that are special little bullets that show us the cavalry were here, armored men,” archaeologist Paul Logue told BBC News.
