Battle of Blore Heath with a stone cross in 1765. The battle was commemorated by a re-enactment each year in September at Blore Heath until 2009. Battle of Blore Heath The Battle of Blore Heath was one of the first major battles in the English Wars of the Roses. It was fought on 23 September 1459, at Blore Heath in Staffordshire. Blore Heath itself is a sparsely populated area of farmland, two miles east of the town of Market Drayton in Shropshire, and close to the towns of Market Drayton and Loggerheads, Staffordshire. After the First Battle of St Albans in 1455, an uneasy
Wars of the Roses under Lancastrian commanders held out for years: Dunstanburgh, Alnwick (the Percy family seat), and Bamburgh were some of the last to fall. There was also some fighting in Ireland. At the Battle of Piltown in 1462, the Yorkish supporter Thomas FitzGerald, 7th Earl of Desmond, defeated the Lancastrian Butlers of Kilkenny. The Butlers suffered more than 400 casualties. Local folklore claims that the battle was so violent that the local river ran red with blood, hence the names Pill River and Piltown ("Baile an Phuill", meaning "Town of the blood"). There were Lancastrian revolts in the north of England in