It appears on an Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1911, labelled simply as one of two "Soldiers Graves", the south-eastern of the pair, plotted with the quiet confidence of a cartographer who had reason to believe something was there. By 1976, when someone went to look, there was nothing to see at all.

The burial sits within the area known locally as the Battlefield, and that name points directly to the events of 8th September 1798, when the Battle of Ballinamuck brought a decisive and brutal end to the rebellion that had been carried westward across Ireland by a combined force of United Irishmen and French troops under General Humbert. The French, who had landed at Killala Bay in Mayo some weeks earlier, were granted honourable surrender; their Irish allies were not. Many were killed on the field or in the immediate aftermath, and the dead were not given marked graves of the kind that might endure. The soldiers buried at Shanmullagh, whoever they were, left nothing behind them except a pair of dots on a map drawn more than a century after the fighting, and not even that, by the time anyone thought to look in person.