Before Sheemore

Meet Robert Keon

Before the trial reduced him to a name in the record, Robert Keon was an attorney, husband and father.

An imagined portrait based on a family photograph.

Before Sheemore

Robert Keon

Robert Keon was one of five brothers and was admitted as an attorney of His Majesty's Court of Exchequer in 1759.

He lived at Moreagh House on the Newbrook estate in County Leitrim and practised as an attorney in Carrick-on-Shannon.

He was married to Bridget Kelly, and they had a son, William.

A man of education and standing, Robert became a tragic figure after the events on Sheemore Hill on 16 October 1786, when George Nugent Reynolds was fatally shot.

Robert was convicted of murder in Dublin in 1787 and executed at Newgate Prison, Dublin, on 20 February 1788.

Before Sheemore, before the trial, before history remembered him for a single act.

An imagined portrait based on a family photograph.

Wife and mother

Bridget Keon

Very little is known about Bridget Keon. Like many women of her time, she appears only briefly in the historical record.

In The Truth of Sheemore, I imagined the wife who stood beside Robert Keon as his world unravelled, drawing on the customs, expectations and surviving evidence of late eighteenth-century Ireland.

Their son William was still a child when his father was executed. He later died in Jamaica in 1804.

Behind every verdict are lives history almost forgot. Bridget’s story is reconstructed from the fragments that remain.

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