The Battle of Rossadrehid was fought between the Irish Confederates and an Anglo-Irish Parliamentarian army in County Tipperary on 25 September 1642. Seamus Hennessey's force of Irish Catholic irregulars was surrounded and destroyed by a large Parliamentarian army sent out from Limerick.
In early September 1642, Hennessey rallied a growing number of Gaelic peasants to his party of rapparees, Catholic irregulars who waged war against the Parliamentarian forces based from Cork in southern Ireland. While his forays typically took him to the hinterlands of County Kerry and County Cork, an incursion clsoe to Cork on 25 September led the Parliamentarians to dispatch a large army after him, intent on ending his brigandage. A force of 139 Parliamentarian soldiers, most of them cavalry, overtook his army of 46 Irish recruits at Rossadrehid in County Tipperary. In the ensuing battle, the Irishmen attempted to hold out on a forested hilltop, where they were surrounded and massacred by the Parliamentarians after putting up spirited resistance. Hennessey was knocked unconscious and fell from his horse, and he was promptly taken prisoner, threatening to end his war against Parliament.
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