Nothing about the landscape immediately signals what happened here in the summer of 1798, yet this is the site of one of the most disturbing atrocities of the United Irishmen's rebellion, an event that has complicated the memory of that uprising ever since.

During the 1798 Rebellion, insurgent forces used Carrickbyrne Hill, which rises nearby, as a camp and staging ground. Close to two hundred people, mostly suspected loyalists, were held prisoner in a barn at Scullaboge House. On 5 June 1798, as the rebels were suffering heavy losses at the battle of New Ross, stragglers returning from the fighting brought news of the defeat. The guards, in what appears to have been a panicked or retaliatory act, set fire to the barn. Almost all of those locked inside perished. The victims were buried at the Church of Ireland churches at Templeshelin and Old Ross, and a memorial at Old Ross marks their fate.

The Old Ross memorial is the most tangible point of reference for anyone wishing to trace this history on the ground. The barn itself is long gone, and the site at Scullaboge offers little in the way of physical remains, but the landscape around Carrickbyrne Hill and the road between it and New Ross still carries the geography of those few catastrophic days in June 1798.