A Thousand Set Out: The March of O’Sullivan Beare and the Blue O’Sullivan Tartan

17 Oct, 2026 | Ammar

They left Glengarriff on 31 December 1602, about a thousand of them, in the dark end of the year.

Four hundred were soldiers. The rest were servants, horseboys, women, children and old people, the household and followers of a Gaelic lord who no longer had a home to keep them in. His name was Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare. Six months earlier an English army had battered down his castle at Dunboy, on the Beara peninsula in west Cork, and hanged every survivor of the garrison. Now his herds had been driven off as well, and without cattle a lordship in Gaelic Ireland could not feed itself for a week. His surname is one of the commonest in Ireland now, and since about 2000 it has had a cloth of its own, the blue O’Sullivan tartan.

There was one friendly roof left in the country, the castle of O’Rourke of Breifne, in Leitrim. It was three hundred miles to the north, in midwinter, through land held by lords who had every reason to stop him.

He decided to walk there.

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How to Use Meme Sounds to Make a Video Punchline Land at the Right Moment

12 Oct, 2026 | Brian

A punchline can die in a quarter of a second. Drop the sound too early, and it steps on the joke. Drop it too late, and the laugh has already passed.

Meme sounds work because viewers already know what they mean. A vine boom says something big just happened, and a sad trombone says someone failed. That shared meaning only pays off when the timing is right. Get the moment right, and a two-second clip can carry the whole video.

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