Protestants and Catholics raided each other’s settlements, burning, pillaging, and slaughtering. The Protestant banner was raised by the Peep o’ Day Boys, so known because they appeared outside their victims’ cabins just as dawn lit up the glens, while the Catholic Defenders matched their foes lash for lash, bludgeon for bludgeon. County Armagh was particularly vulnerable to these “outrages,” as Protestants sought systematically to rid the county of Catholics. In 1791–92 alone, some 7,000 Armagh Catholics were forced to flee south into counties Louth and Monaghan. Among those who took flight were a small clan of Kirks, for whom the religious warfare must have been particularly unsettling. For the Kirks had once been Protestants: Scottish Presbyterians from the lowland county of Dumfriesshire, who had emigrated to Northern Ireland around 1630. Sometime during the intervening century and a half, at least one Kirk had converted to Catholicism, apparently to marry a Catholic girl.
