All being prepared, King Brian marched on Dublin, setting fire on his way to all the country round, so that the Norsemen when they arrived saw the land as one sheet of flame. The battle was fought on the north side of the River Liffey, where the land falls low toward the sea at Clontarf, up to the wooded country on the heights behind which Phœnix Park now extends. Here, with the wood behind them called Tomar’s Wood, were the lines of the Irish forces, facing the bay where the Norsemen brought in their ships. On the south side of the river was the fort of the Norsemen, where Dublin Castle now stands, and from its walls King Sitric and his mother Gormliath watched the fight. Besides these two, another spectator followed the course of the battle. This was Sitric’s wife, who was Brian’s daughter, married to the chief of her country’s foes. Though she stood by her husband’s side, her heart was with the men of Munster, and with her father and brothers who led their hosts. In the beginning of the day it seemed to the men of Dublin who were watching from the battlements that the swords of the enemy were mowing down Brian’s troops, even as the ripe corn in a field might fall if two or three battalions were reaping it at once. “Well do the Norsemen reap the field,” said Sitric. “It will be at the end of the day, that we shall see if that be so,” said the wife of Sitric, Brian’s daughter. All day long, from sunrise till evening, the battle was fought. At full tide in the morning the foreigners beached their boats, but when the tide returned at night, they were being everywhere routed before the Irish, who rushed down upon them from the upland, pushing them farther and farther backward toward the sea. Then, as they turned to fly, hoping to regain their vessels, they saw that the rising tide had lifted the boats from their resting-places and carried them out to sea, so that they were there caught between their enemies on the land and the sea behind, with no place of safety to turn to. An awful rout was made of them, and the sounds of their shouting and war-whoops and cries of despair were heard by the watchers of the fort. Then Brian’s daughter turned to her husband. “It appears to me,” she said, “that, like gad-flies in the heat, or like a herd of cows seeking the water, the foreigners return to the sea, their natural inheritance. I wonder are they cattle, driven by the heat? But if they are they tarry not to be milked.” The answer of her husband was a brutal blow upon the mouth. Close to the weir of Clontarf, where the River Tolka seeks the sea, Turlough, the young grandson of Brian, pursued a Norseman across the stream. But the rising tide flung him against the weir, and he was caught on a post, and so was drowned, with his hand grasping the hair of the Norseman who fell under him.