Usher's Island.—This was once a fashionable resort. Moira House stood here. It was ornamented so beautifully, that John Wesley observed, when visiting Lady Moira, that one of the rooms was more elegant than any he had seen in England. Here, in 1777, Charles Fox was introduced to Grattan. Poor Pamela (Lady Edward FitzGerald) was at Moira House on the evening of her husband's arrest; and here she heard the fatal news on the following morning, her friends having concealed it from her until then. In 1826 it was converted into a mendicity institution, and all its ornamental portions removed.
Defeated.—O'Neill's bard, MacNamee, wrote a lament for the chieftains who fell in this engagement. He states that the head of "O'Neill, King of Tara, was sent to London;" and attributes the defeat of the Irish to the circumstance of their adversaries having fought in coats-of-mail, while they had only satin shirts:—
"Unequal they entered the battle,
The Galls and the Irish of Tara;
Fair satin shirts on the race of Conn,
The Galls in one mass of iron."
He further deplores the removal of the chief's noble face from Down, lamenting that his resurrection should not be from amongst the limestone-covered graves of the fathers of his clan at Armagh.