There is an iron cross set in a concrete base beside it, and a metal plate carrying an inscription that stops you short: 'In commemoration of the heroic sacrifices of General Blake & Gunner McGee Executed on the Battlefield of Ballinamuck 1798 R.I.P.' The word executed, not fallen, not killed in action, carries a weight that the modest mound itself does nothing to diminish.

The Battle of Ballinamuck, fought on 8th September 1798, was the brutal final act of the United Irishmen's rebellion in the midlands. A French expeditionary force under General Humbert, which had landed in Mayo weeks earlier and briefly captured Castlebar, was caught and overwhelmed by Crown forces near the village of Ballinamuck. The French, as uniformed soldiers of a recognised belligerent power, were granted terms of surrender and treated as prisoners of war. Their Irish allies were afforded no such consideration; many were cut down in the field or executed afterwards. The grave at Shanmullagh sits in what has long been known locally as the 'Battlefield' area. This is the more southerly of two such graves shown on the large-scale Ordnance Survey plan, and when it was inspected in 1976 the mound was found projecting from the south-eastern side of a north-east to south-west field boundary, a subrectangular shape in earth and stone that had survived nearly two centuries of agricultural use around it.

The inscription names General Blake and Gunner McGee specifically, though the grave itself is unassuming enough that it could easily be walked past. The two men were executed rather than killed in combat, a distinction the memorial's wording preserves with quiet deliberateness. What remains above ground is minimal, the kind of marker that accumulates meaning slowly, through knowing what happened here rather than through any monumentality of its own.