Paul Devlin recalls a Robin Hood-like rapparee, Shane Crossan O Mullan

 

I hear no talk these days, of our bold rapparee Shane Crossan O Mullan. Sadly there are no statues or effigies in honour of a man who was a heroic figure to many, while also a great embarrassment to the Crown.
A real-life Robin Hood character but with conclusive historic credentials aplenty, Shane lived and died on the hangman’s rope in Derry but not before he made his mark among the poor and starving of the Sperrin Mountain range.

The Great Glen of Shane became the rapparee’s hunting ground, where he would steal from the rich travellers on horse-drawn coaches from Belfast to the Linen Mills of Derry. Shane’s story was a familiar one in the lreland of its day.

Dispossession and homelessness drew the young rapparee to the dense forests of Ligwood, above Claudy, where he joined a community of similiar folk who had lost their homesteads to make way for English settlers hoping for a better way of life in lreland.
Shane’s ancestral home at Tullanee, Faughanvale, was taken from his father, Dominic, who was a school master, and it drew him to a life of crime, but during those turbulent times no record exists of him ever taken a human life.

Many of the men at Lingwood Grove had already been tested in battle when engaged on the Jacobite side during the Williamite war.
What right had the King to take and give land that was not his own?

Despite his father’s protests Shane formed a band of post-war guerrilla fighting men around him. He chose only the best and fittest who could run on foot, leaden with musket ball and rifle, and those proficient with the art of pike fighting. Shane’s main conspirator was Para Fada or Tall Paddy. Tall Paddy, like many, had fought and swung pike against the Williamite soldiers and when in defeat had taken with his family into the deep forest of Lingwood Grove, far from the preying eyes of the crown’s spies.

Mounted upon horses stolen from ambushed coaches, O Mullan and his men could cover large areas of ground which allowed them to increase their takings of gold and silver and other riches from further carriages that they targeted.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own