Battle of Benburb The Battle of Benburb took place on 5 June 1646 during the Irish Confederate Wars , the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms . It was fought between the forces of Confederate Ireland under Owen Roe O ' Neill and a Scottish Covenanter and Anglo - Irish army under Robert Monro . The battle ended in a decisive victory for the Irish Confederates and ended the Scottish hopes of conquering Ireland and imposing their own religious settlement there . Background . The Scots had landed an army in Ulster in 1642 , to protect the Scottish settlers there from the massacres that followed the Irish Rebellion of 1641 . They also hoped to conquer the country , to destroy Catholicism there and impose Presbyterianism as the state religion . They landed at Carrickfergus and linked up with an army of British settlers based around Derry who were led by Robert Stewart . They cleared Ulster of Irish rebels by 1643 , but were unable to advance south of mid - Ulster , which was held by Owen Roe O ' Neill , the general of the Irish Confederate Ulster army . Both sides robbed and killed civilians in territory controlled by their enemy , so that by 1646 , a sort of no man ' s land of scorched earth separated the opposing sides . O ' Neill remarked of the devastation that Ulster looked , " not only like a desert , but like hell " . While the three armies continued to raid into each other ' s territory , none of them could organise enough supplies to hold any captured territory . In 1646 , Monro and Stewart joined forces , making a major foray into Confederate held territory . According to some accounts , this was an attempt to take the Confederates ' capital at Kilkenny ; other sources say it was only a major raid . Either way , the combined British force was about 6 , 000 strong . Monro had ten regiments of infantry , of whom six were Scottish and four were English or Anglo - Irish , and 600 Ulster Protestant cavalry . O ' Neill , who was a very cautious general , had previously avoided fighting pitched battles . However , he had just been supplied by the Papal Nuncio to Ireland , Giovanni Battista Rinuccini , with muskets , ammunition and money with which to pay his soldiers ' wages . This allowed him to put over 5 , 000 men into the field – an army slightly smaller than his enemy ' s . The Covenanters had six cannon , whereas the Confederates had none . The battle . Monro had assumed that O ' Neill would try to avoid his army and so had his soldiers march over to intercept the Irish force at Benburb , in modern south Tyrone . Gerard Hayes - McCoy wrote , " many of them must have been close to exhaustion before the battle began " . Monro ' s men drew up with their backs to the River Blackwater , facing O ' Neill ' s troops who were positioned on a rise in the ground . The battle commenced with Monro ' s artillery firing on the Irish position , but without causing many casualties . Monro ' s cavalry then charged the Irish infantry , but were unable to break the Confederates ' pike and musket formation . When this attack had failed , O ' Neill ordered his infantry to advance , pushing the British back into a loop of the river by the " push of the pike " . It was noted that the Irish pikes had longer shafts and narrower heads than those of their opponents , meaning that they outreached them and were " better to pierce " . At this point , the fatigue of the British soldiers told against them and they were gradually pushed backwards until their formation collapsed in on itself . The Confederate infantry then broke Monro ' s disordered formation with a musket volley at point - blank range and fell in amongst them with swords and " scians " ( Irish long knives ) . Monro and his cavalry fled the scene , as , shortly after , did his infantry . A great many of them were cut down or drowned in the ensuing pursuit . The British force lost between 2 , 000 and 3 , 000 killed or captured , mostly in the pursuit ; the Irish roughly 300 . Benburb was the only time in which an Irish Confederate army won a major field battle between 1641 and 1653 . O ' Neill ' s Ulster army showed a discipline and training that was lacking in the Confederate disasters at Dungans Hill and Knocknanauss the following year . O ' Neill ' s victory meant that the Covenanters were no longer a threat to the Confederates , but they remained encamped around Carrickfergus for the rest of the war . However , O ' Neill did not follow up his victory but took his army south to interfere in the politics of Confederate Ireland . In particular , he wanted to make sure that the treaty the Supreme Council of the Confederates had signed with the English Royalists would not be ratified .