Lough Key is part of a landscape where the lake, old estate grounds, and narrow rural lanes shape both the setting and the routes between homes. Near it, the narrator sees the beauty of The Nurseries, while a later visit to his home follows a rain-lashed lane around a lake and up to a low hill between two lakes.

Estate Landscape and The Nurseries

The Nurseries stood on twelve acres at Grevisk, outside the walls of Rockingham Estate. The beautiful stone house had once served as the head gardener’s home for the nursery gardens associated with the Nash house above Lough Key. At the gardens’ height, fourteen gardeners worked the land. Great trees, exotic plants and flowers brought from India and China, and grass-grown walks preserved the marks of that cultivated past; the soil was notably rich.

The property’s relationship to the wider estate landscape was made tangible by a gate in the high wall across the road. Beyond it, a bridle path ran through woods and pastures all the way to Rockingham House. The ladies of Rockingham had once ridden along this path to consult the head gardener about plants and shrubs for the house gardens, linking the nursery grounds to the estate’s domestic life.

A Planned Retirement Home

Francis McGahern had bought The Nurseries after lengthy negotiations, with retirement in view. The narrator enjoyed helping him in the fields and wild gardens, cutting fallen trees, tending a few black cattle, and clearing growth from the orchard. In those surroundings, Francis repeatedly voiced a vision of solidarity and shared strength: the land became the setting for his insistence that together they could face the world.

Roads, Lakes, and Return

A later journey to the narrator’s home near Keshcarrigan brought the surrounding landscape into a different light. Agnes McShera and Francis travelled by car from Cootehall through Leitrim village to Keshcarrigan, along the route the narrator had once taken with a jennet and a white bullock when the final ties to the Aughawillan farm were severed. The last lanes ran between high banks and tall whitethorns, past poor, rushy hills, to a house on a low hill between two lakes.

Agnes drove, but they left the car at the road and walked the remaining distance around the lake and up to the house. The day was dark and wet, with a bitter wind driving waves against the lake wall and scattering foam across the lane. Rain weighed down the hedge of sally, ash, oak, rowan, wild cherry, alder, and hawthorn. Against this exposed, difficult approach, Francis’s charming presentation of a half-bottle of Powers to Madeline Green offered a small gesture of welcome. The route’s remembered links to the narrator’s departure from Aughawillan make the lake country more than a backdrop: it holds together the story’s movements between farm, estate, and home.