Burning of Wildgoose Lodge

Eight people died in the October 1816 fire, including an infant only five months old, while eighteen men later faced execution for the crime. The house stood near the County Monaghan border in Reaghstown, caught between bad weather, rising prices and a recession that had tightened every local throat. William Carleton later shaped the event into a story of oath-bound revenge, and that version still circles the facts like smoke around a burnt raft.