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The Battle of Dungan's Hill took place in Meath, in eastern Ireland in August 1647. It was fought between the armies of Confederate Ireland and the English Parliament during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The Irish army was intercepted on a march towards Dublin and destroyed. Although it is a little known event, even in Ireland, the battle was very bloody (with over 3000 deaths) and had important political repercussions. The Parliamentarian victory there destroyed the Irish Confederate’s Leinster army and contributed towards the collapse of the Confederate cause and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649.

By 1647, The Irish Catholic Confederation controlled all of Ireland except for Parliamentarian enclaves around Dublin and Cork and a Scottish outpost in Ulster. The previous year they had rejected a treaty with the English Royalists in favour of eliminating the remaining British forces in Ireland.

In August 1647, the Confederate Leinster army under Thomas Preston was attempting to take Dublin from the English Parliamentarian garrison under Michael Jones, when it was intercepted by the Roundheads and forced to give battle. Jones had marched to Trim to relieve the Parliamentarian outpost there at Trim Castle. Preston, who had been shadowing Jone's movements, attempted to march on Dublin before Jones' army got back there, but covered only 19 of the 60 or so kilometres (12 of the 40 miles) before being caught at Dungans Hill and had to form up for battle.

The battle took place near the modern village of Summerhill and along the present main road between Trim and Maynooth. Both armies were around 6000 strong.

From a Parliamentarian point of view, victory in this battle was presented to them by the incompetence of the Irish commander. Preston was a veteran of the Thirty Years' War where he had been a commander of the Spanish garrison at Leuven, but had no experience of open warfare or handling cavalry (Jones by contrast had been a cavalry officer in the English Civil War). As a result, he tried to move his cavalry along a narrow covered lane (site of the present day main road), where they were trapped and subjected to enemy fire without being able to respond. The demoralised Irish cavalry fled the field, leaving Preston’s infantry alone.

The Confederate’s infantry were primarily equipped with pikes and heavy muskets, and trained to stand in tercios in the Spanish manner. This meant they were difficult to break, but also highly immobile, without cavalry to cover their cumbersome formation when it moved. What was worse, Preston had positioned them in a large walled field, so that when their cavalry had run away, the Parliamentarians could surround and trap them. Some of the Irish infantry, Scottish Highlanders, brought to Ireland by Alasdair MacColla, managed to charge and break through Jones’ men and escape into a nearby bog, where the English cavalry could not follow. Preston and about 2-3000 of his regular infantry managed to follow the Highlanders to safety, but the remainder were trapped.

What happened next is disputed. The Irish infantry managed to hold off several assaults on their position, before trying to follow their comrades into the safety of the bog. This made them lose their formation and the Parliamentarians got in amongst them and then surrounded them in the bogland. Parliamentarian accounts simply say that the Irish force was then destroyed. Irish accounts, however, claim that the Confederate troops surrendered and were then massacred. One account, by a Catholic friar named O Meallain, says that the corpses of the Irish foot soldiers were found with their hands tied. A recent study (Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, Cork 2001), suggests that the Irishmen probably tried to surrender, but that, according to the conventions of 17th century warfare, this had to be accepted before it entitled them to safety. In this case, it was not accepted and the infantrymen were butchered. Around 3000 Confederate troops and a small number of Parliamentarians died at Dungans Hill. Most of the dead were Irish infantrymen killed in the last stage of the battle. Those prisoners who were taken were mainly officers, whom the Parliamentarians could either ransom or exchange for prisoners of their own. Richard Talbot (later Earl of Tyroconnell and Lord Deputy of Ireland, but then a junior cavalry officer) was among the Confederate prisoners.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Owen Roe O'Neill's Ulster army came south to protect Confederate held Leinster from Jones. However the Confederates best trained and equipped army had been destroyed and with it, their last chance of winning the war without Royalist help.

• Confederate Ireland
• Irish battles
• Irish Confederate Wars