The MacDonnells of Dunnyveg were a Scottish family with their base on the Hebridean island of Islay, but for generations they had been settling the Glens of Antrim, just sixteen miles across the North Channel. To them it made perfect sense. The Glens spoke the same Gaelic, traded with the same ports, and felt like an extension of the Highlands. To the English crown in London, it looked like a foreign army camped on a flank that Henry VIII and now Elizabeth I had begun to consider properly part of their realm. By 1565 the MacDonnells were pushing south into Lecale and rebuilding fortifications like Red Bay Castle, which commanded the strategic landing beach at Waterfoot. Shane O'Neill, having just been recognised in London as effective overlord of much of Ulster, decided to drive them out himself.

What followed was a piece of military theatre. Shane assembled around two thousand men at the tower house of Feadan near Newry, an army of cavalry, longbowmen, redshanks, Galloglass, kerns, and gunners, and moved with extraordinary speed. He kept Easter at Feadan to disguise the muster, then cut a road wide enough for six soldiers abreast straight through the great forest of Killultagh in a single week. The MacDonnells had counted on weeks to gather reinforcements from the Highlands. They got days. By the time their chief, James MacDonald, 6th of Dunnyveg, landed his first ships at Waterfoot, his castle there was already burning and Shane's cavalry held the beach. The Scots had to land further north at Ballycastle instead, where they linked up with Sorley Boy MacDonnell's locally raised host, brought over the Cary Mountains by the old MacDonnell road.

Ballycastle in 1565 was barely a town, but the geography that mattered is still legible today. Shane's army camped in what is now the centre of the modern town, between the Diamond and the River Tow, with full access to water. He drove the MacDonnells onto the higher ground at Ramon, the ridge at the head of modern Castle Street where the Presbyterian Church now stands. The Scots had position, but only one small well. Shane had position too, and the river, and surprise, and the certainty that came from knowing reinforcements were on his side. When the assault came at first light, he forgoed the usual opening exchange of arrows and darts and sent his Galloglass straight up the slope with axes and two-handed swords. The MacDonnell host, around five hundred strong by then, broke after a violent and confused interval and fled over Knocklayd Mountain toward Glenshesk, trying to reach the boats at Cushendun.

The retreat became a rout, and the rout became slaughter. Shane's secretary Gerrot Flemming put the dead at between six and seven hundred. James of Dunnyveg, the clan chief, took a wound in the early fighting that would kill him two months later in captivity at Castle Crocke near Strabane. His brother Angus was killed during the chase, reportedly while making a stand at a standing stone below Breen Wood. Sorley Boy MacDonnell, who would later become the great surviving figure of the family, was captured along with James. A third brother, Alistair Og, had landed at Rathlin Island with the last reinforcements raised in Scotland - reputedly nine hundred men - but with the mainland coast already lost there was nothing for him to do. He returned to Scotland. Shane swept on to take Dunseverick and Dunluce within days.

Shane O'Neill did not live to enjoy his victory. He was assassinated two years later by his own MacDonnell nephews, a final twist in a story already full of them. But the breaking of the Scottish lordship of the Glens at Glentaisie shaped everything that came after. Sorley Boy, freed and back in Antrim, spent twenty years rebuilding MacDonnell power in a long, grinding struggle against the O'Neills of Clandeboye, the MacQuillans, and the English. He finally won official recognition of his claim to Ballycastle and the Route in 1586. His descendants would become the Earls of Antrim, seated at Glenarm Castle along the coast to the south. None of that line, none of the castles, none of the Antrim Glens as we know them today, would have taken their final shape without that pre-dawn rush up the ridge at Ramon four hundred and sixty years ago.