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Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be taken as soon as the army should reach the castle, it being his dying request, as he thought that he might be loosed from his fetters, as he deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned and fettered.
Donell then, finding a large stone by his side, hurled it directly down upon Rury, so that it fell on the crest of his helmet, on the top of his head, and crushed it, so that he instantly died. The invading forces were afterwards defeated, and by this throw Donell saved his own life and acquired the lordship of Tyrconnell."
We see that the Normans are already fallen under the same influence of assimilation which had transformed the Danes two hundred years before. A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was installed in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O'Donell.
It is plain, contrary to Lord Macaulay's statement, that Sir John Dalrymple, William's trusted man for Scotland, at this time hoped for Breadalbane's success in pacifying the clans. But Dalrymple, by December 1691, wrote, "I think the Clan Donell must be rooted out, and Lochiel." He could not mean that he hoped to massacre so large a part of the population.
I have long and personally known and admired the late Bishop Mac Donell; a worthier or a better man never existed. The highest and the lowest alike loved him.
Above this wall, to the right and left, towers the mountain ridge, covered with forest to the south, and with the greenest of grass to the north, where, stately and sad, stands the pillar under whose base moulder the bones of the gallant Brock, and of Mac Donell, his aide-de-camp.
Not long after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the castle of Inis an island in Lough Swilly. As soon as Rury received tidings of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish the castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.
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