An Irishman's Diary

BETTER late than never, over Christmas, I finally got around to reading Terence Dooley's The Murders at Wildgoose Lodge; and a brilliant read it was. The book is an exemplary piece of historical research. But if nothing else it deserves praise for finally rescuing the terrible events of the title from the grip of William Carleton's famous short story, which has passed as truth for 175 years.

Where I grew up, about five miles away from it, Wildgoose Lodge had innocent connotations. It was the site of a greyhound-schooling track on the Louth-Monaghan border, where I occasionally used to accompany a neighbour who kept dogs. This was where young greyhounds learned the art of running in a straight line after an electrified approximation of a hare.

It had the added advantage of offering race-track conditions while - not being an actual track - allowing trial runs to go unrecorded by the form book. The owner was skilled with a stopwatch, so you could get a very accurate impression of a dog's performance and, in theory at least, be a step ahead of the bookmakers.

It was only years later that someone gave me a copy of Carleton's Gothic tale and I learned for the first time about the original lodge and its grim fate. The real-life tragedy had three acts. First, in April 1816, there was the raid for guns by local agrarian activists: a commonplace at the time, except that in this case the lodge's tenant - a farmer called Lynch - reported the crime, which led to the hanging of three alleged raiders.

Then came the appalling revenge, the part on which Carleton's story centres. The comrades of the dead bided their time. But six months later, a force of 100 men surrounded the lodge one night and burned it to the ground. Eight people died in the flames - Lynch and his extended family and servants, including a five-month-old baby.

The final act was the state's revenge, terrible in its own way. In July 1817, the ringleader of the burning party, Patrick Devan, was hanged in the lodge's ruins, as 30,000 people watched from the surrounding hills. He was followed to the gallows that summer and autumn by 17 others, their bodies then left to rot for months in gibbets suspended at strategic locations throughout North Louth.

It was into this ghoulish tableau that Carleton walked - literally - in the autumn of 1817. A travelling teacher, he had recently left home in Tyrone bound for Dublin and, he hoped, literary fame. En route, he stopped to stay with a friend in Killanny, a parish straddling Monaghan and Louth.

Here he heard the details of a story that, even without embellishment, seemed to belong with the Gothic fiction then so fashionable.

The burning had taken place in the dead of night, just before Halloween. The main party of raiders had met beforehand in a local church (where Devan was sexton). But the conspiracy also stretched well beyond the locality, to as far away as Cavan and Meath, from where other groups had been summoned and obediently came, by horseback and, in one case, by boat.

All Carleton had to do was to place himself in the centre of this extraordinary event, as the first-person narrator horrified but powerless to intervene - another Gothic device - and he had a work of fact-based fiction so vivid it would become part of the local memory.

And yet, despite the impression he gave in a footnote, Carleton was not an entirely disinterested witness. Born a Catholic, he was a social climber whose adult conversion to Anglicanism may have been a pragmatic decision to improve his chances of patronage. His treatment of the story certainly was, as Dooley explains.

Horrible as the actual events were, Carleton elevated the horror by portraying it as the triumph of pure evil, divorced from any social or economic context, but in which Catholicism was a corrupting factor. Here, he had his eye fixed on an important readership: an ascendancy increasingly nervous about O'Connell's emancipation movement.

Notoriously, in his first version, he even suggested Lynch was Protestant - "the only Protestant man in the parish" - when in fact he was as much a Catholic as his attackers.

Dooley also exposes simple laziness on Carleton's part. One of the grimly colourful "facts" of the latter's footnote concerned the placing of the ringleader's gibbet. Devan's mother could not leave her home without seeing it, claims Carleton, on which occasions she was known to exclaim: "God be good to the soul of me poor marthyred son".

This little vignette added to a picture of the Catholic lower orders' incorrigibility. But it never happened. According to Dooley, Devan's mother was dead before the execution.

Impossible as the crime is to understand, The Murders at Wildgoose Lodge at least places it in context: against the end of the Napoleonic wars and the economic crash that followed, the collapse of the local weaving trade, unpayable rents, mass evictions, and threatened famine.

Dooley also suggests persuasively that many who swung for the burning were innocent victims of the shortcuts taken in a panicked rush to retribution.

It is a measure of the shadow cast by the events that part of the lodge's ruins stand undisturbed to this day, under a tree on a hill-top just off the N2 from Dublin to Derry. Until recent times, a nearby lane was known locally as "Hell Street", or "Hell's Road", being by reputation the path taken by the burning party on the fateful night.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com