1566.] DEATH OF a NEIL. 563 Here died M'Guyre at the monastery of Omagh within sight of the home to which he was returning by the pleasant shores of Lough Erne. Here too the Earl of Kildare nearly escaped being taken prisoner: he was surprised with a small party in a wood, attacked with ' harquebusses and Scottish arrows/ and hardly cut his way through. Detained longer than he intended by foul October, weather, Sidney broke up from Omagh on the 2nd of October, crossed ' the dangerous and swift river there,' 'and rested that night on a neck of land near a broken castle of Tirlogh Lenogh, called the Salmon Castle/ On the 3rd he was over the Deny, and by the evening he had reached Lifford, where he expected to find Randolph and the English army. At Lifford however no English were to be discovered, but only news of them. Randolph, to whose discretion the ultimate choice of his quarters had been committed, had been struck as he came up Lough Foyle with the situation of Deny. Nothing then stood on the site of the present city save a decrepit and deserted monastery of Augustine monks, which was said to have been built in the time of St Columba ; but the eye of the English commander saw in the form of the ground, in the magnificent lake, and the splendid tide river, a site for the foundation of a powerful colony suited alike for a military station and a commercial and agricultural town. There therefore Colonel Randolph had landed his men, and there Sid- ney joined him, and after a careful survey entirely
