In the autumn of 1816, eight persons perished in the burning of Wild-Goose Lodge, in County Louth. The house stood upon a narrow tongue of land in the midst of a marshy meadow; in winter, floodwaters were liable to sever it from the neighbourhood, leaving only a slender pathway. Here flax was grown and dressed. A few months earlier, it had served as the meeting place for a clandestine confederacy. Its occupant, Edward Lynch, had at last closed his door against them.
Lynch wrought flax into linen cloth, which he carried for sale to Dundalk or Newry. His house served also as his workshop, and the labour stored within the loom accorded the occupant a recognized standing in the vicinity. He had initially welcomed the gatherings of the Ribbonmen, a secret society established throughout the district. According to Pelham, Lynch had joined because he believed such an association might counterbalance similar manifestations from the opposing faction. Yet the assemblies grew more frequent, and the designs of their leaders proved far more violent than what he had assented to. Fearing he might be held answerable for their deeds, he requested that the members come beneath his roof no more. The chronicle observes that the confederacy exacted from its initiates an oath of secrecy and forbade them to seek legal redress against a fellow member; its narrator maintains, however, that no such oath could rightfully deprive a victim of recourse to the law. This gloss does not prove that the confederates conceded him such a right. Lynch thus found himself placed between those to whom he had sworn an oath and neighbours intent on preserving their dominion over his home.
On 10 April 1816, a masked band broke into his dwelling. Local extracts align Lynch’s deposition with an account from the Belfast Newsletter: the men demanded firearms, then ransacked the furniture and the loom. Pelham adds that Lynch was stripped and scourged before his family, and that the marauders insulted his wife. They severed the linen web still bound to the loom as far as the beam, destroying the fruits of labour destined for market. This time, Lynch lodged a formal complaint. Pelham recounts that he had first appealed to his priest, without obtaining protection, and that the nocturnal persecutions persisted. Three men—Michael Tiernan, Patrick Stanley, and Phillip Conlan—were prosecuted for the outrage and hanged at Dundalk on 1 August, according to the records of the Louth County Library. Pelham counts only two men brought to justice following the attack and omits these names; local records thus diverge regarding the number. The law laid hold of certain of his assailants, but it likewise made Lynch’s rupture with the confederacy a matter of public notoriety.
The meetings were subsequently removed to the chapel at Stonetown. Patrick Devane, styled also Paddy in Camden Pelham’s chronicle, was its clerk and held it in his charge. A few months after the executions, a nocturnal assembly gathered there. James Anton, an officer then stationed in the district who published his recollections in 1841, relates that the men were assembled near the altar. Pelham adds that Devane administered an oath of secrecy to them, denounced Lynch for having forsaken the body, and held up his chastisement as a warning intended for the remaining members. He then took up a potsherd bearing a sod of burning turf, and bade them follow him.
The band set forth on foot or on horseback. Pelham estimates that dozens of horsemen had ridden in from afar in answer to an urgent summons, while others followed on foot. Anton depicts men who, along the way, inquired of one another in low voices what was about to unfold; in his telling, several had failed to grasp the true extent of the enterprise announced by their leaders. Pelham adds that certain among them, even after hearing the threats, did not believe they would be carried into execution, nor that anyone would go beyond past acts of violence. This uncertainty did nothing to arrest their course: Devane led them toward the house and commanded that a cordon be formed about it. According to Pelham, only a small party advanced, bearing pikes in one hand and sods of burning turf in the other. The flax stored within the dwelling, which furnished Lynch’s livelihood, caught fire in a matter of minutes. The chronicle records cries for help from within, and relates that the armed men thrust back those who endeavoured to escape; a servant of Lynch’s appeared likewise upon a wall to cry out for aid. Pelham asserts that the ring kept watch until all sound of life had ceased before dispersing. These particulars come to us from Pelham’s chronicle, in its 1891 edition; they have not been verified here against the trial records.
Eight persons died in the conflagration, according to the Louth County Library. The conflicting descriptions of the household do not allow for an indisputable roll to be established here. The criminal chronicle published in 1891 gives a different total, thirteen. The local notice and the diary of Henry McClintock, which mentions eight victims, warrant adopting the figure of eight; the discrepancy persists, as these sources do not yield the same count.
After the fire, the members of the association returned to their hearths. Pelham writes that the autumn winds and winter storms had swept away the ashes before a single participant was brought before the bar of justice. When certain of the less deeply implicated confederates were apprehended, they disclosed what they knew to escape the doom awaiting the ringleaders; the latter had already fled into diverse regions. Devane was run to ground in Dublin, where he was labouring in the shipyards. McClintock’s journal, written by an eyewitness to the execution, describes him as the leader of a troop numbering nearly a hundred men, and records that he acknowledged his guilt upon the scaffold. This testimony casts no light upon the precise part borne by each participant, but it traces the journey from the chapel to the assizes.
Devane was executed within the roofless walls of the burned house, and his body was afterwards conveyed and hung in chains in an iron gibbet at Corcria, his birthplace, according to the diary. McClintock reports that soldiers were stationed beside the gibbet to prevent the remains from being taken down. Pelham dates the trial to 19 July 1817, and states the execution was immediate; the local journal places it on 23 July, whereas a record from the same collection indicates the 24th. The discrepancy remains open. Other men were condemned and executed in their turn; several bodies were gibbeted in neighbouring localities. These penalties answered the massacre with a public spectacle of retribution, yet they could neither restore the dead to their kin nor return to Lynch the dwelling where he had once wrought his flax.