General Saint Ruth's Flag, Kilcommadan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Near Kilcommadan in County Galway, a small rectangular enclosure was once marked on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, sitting roughly a hundred metres north-east of what is thought to be an early ecclesiastical site.
Nothing is visible on the ground today, and the enclosure itself has left no surface trace. What remains is only the name, and the peculiar layering of memory attached to it: a flag, meaning a flat commemorative or grave marker, associated not with any Irish saint but with a French general who died on an Irish battlefield.
Charles Chalmont, Marquis de Saint-Ruth, commanded the Jacobite forces at the Battle of Aughrim in July 1691, one of the bloodiest engagements ever fought on Irish soil. He was killed during the fighting, reportedly decapitated by a cannonball, and his death contributed directly to the Jacobite collapse that day. Local tradition, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by John O'Flanagan in 1927, held that Saint-Ruth was buried in the nearby graveyard, where his flag was still being pointed out to visitors, though the same tradition acknowledged that his body was said to have been subsequently removed. The curious honorific "Saint" in the local placename appears to be a folk elevation, a kind of posthumous dignity attached to a figure who died violently and was mourned, at least locally, as a champion of a lost cause. The enclosure marked on the old maps may have been intended to denote or protect whatever spot was identified as his original resting place.
The site lies close to the broader Aughrim battlefield landscape, an area already layered with memorials, earthworks, and contested ground from the Williamite wars. With no visible remains surviving, there is little to see at the precise location, but the nearby graveyard and the general Kilcommadan area retain their connection to one of the most consequential days in late seventeenth-century Irish history.