This is the old graveyard in Daingean, Co. Offaly, about ten miles from where I grew up. The gravestone in the foreground belongs to Captain Charles Dodgson. The inscription¹ recorded that he was killed in December 1803, ‘ while endeavouring in the arrest of proclaimed traitors to render an essential service to his king and country‘. I suspect that the men who shot him had a distinctly different idea of what constituted treason in Ireland at the time. Charles Dodgson was the grandson of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the author whose pen-name was Lewis Carroll.
¹ The inscription is almost impossible to read, but there is a plaque at the cemetery entrance that describes it.