The ground around them carries the name 'Battlefield', and that name is not incidental.

The battle of Ballinamuck took place on the 8th of September 1798, and it was one of the final, brutal episodes of that year's rebellion. A Franco-Irish force that had landed at Killala Bay in August under the French general Humbert had marched inland, winning a remarkable victory at Castlebar before being caught and overwhelmed by a much larger Crown force at Ballinamuck. The French were treated as prisoners of war; the Irish rebels were not. The graves at Shanmullagh sit within this landscape of aftermath. An Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan, surveyed in 1911, marks them plainly as 'Soldiers Graves', and the northern of the two is the burial recorded here. What the map preserves in ink, the land itself has almost entirely relinquished. There are no headstones, no enclosure, no monument. When the site was visited in 1976, the only indication that anything lay beneath was a barely perceptible swelling in the ground.