This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Ulster rising of October 1641 opened a conflict, also called the Eleven Years War, that convulsed Ireland until the Cromwellian conquest was completed in 1653. The Irish Catholic Confederation, formed at Kilkenny in 1642 by an alliance of Old English and Gaelic Irish Catholic gentry with Catholic clergy sitting in its General Assembly, styled itself Ireland's Catholic and Royal Army and fought English and Scottish Protestant Parliamentarian and later Commonwealth forces, Scottish Covenanter troops defending Ulster's Protestant settlers, and, for parts of the war, English royalist forces.
Oliver Cromwell's 1649 to 1650 campaign, marked by the storming of Drogheda and Wexford, broke organized Confederate resistance, though mopping-up fighting continued in the west until 1653. The Cromwellian land settlement that followed confiscated most land still held by Irish Catholic owners and transplanted many to Connacht, remaking Ireland's landholding along confessional lines for more than two centuries, while the Catholic Church's public institutions were suppressed and priests made subject to banishment or execution under the Commonwealth regime.