Horses

Horses are part of the memoir’s lived landscape: their hoofs mark the road to school, their arrival animates the forge, and their labor helps bring in the harvest. They are not merely scenery. Through the narrator’s memories, they appear as powerful, vulnerable bodies shaped by work and human care, linking childhood wonder to the practical and sometimes harsh conditions of rural life.

Roads, School, and Early Memory

When John McGahern recalls living with his mother and paternal grandmother in a bungalow outside Ballinamore, horses belong to the daily sound and movement of the road. The pass from the main road was covered with forge clinkers, which crunched beneath traffic of hoofs and wheels. This detail locates the child’s home within a working rural world: the road carries people and vehicles, but also the animals whose movement helps define its texture.

The walk to Lisacarn School brought horses into a more intimate childhood geography. Along the lane were gates, banks of wild flowers, and a drinking pool for horses. The pool was an ordinary feature on the route, encountered as John walked with his mother, who named flowers and sometimes stopped to pick them. The remembered lane gathers school, maternal attention, and the visible signs of local animal life into one setting. In later years, similar lanes could bring a fleeting sense of security and peace; the recollection joins that feeling to a particular childhood place without making the horses themselves its cause.

Horses at the Forge

The forge drew the young narrator because it offered a concentrated spectacle of animal size and human skill. Horses arrived alongside carts, traps, mules, jennets, and donkeys. At the rear of the shed, iron heated in the coal fire was lifted with tongs, hammered on the anvil, and applied hot to a raised hoof. The shoe hissed against it; outside, a large stone circle served for shaping the iron shoes used on cartwheels. The work joined the horse’s body to the tools and labor that enabled it to serve on the road.

John’s fascination became imitation. After watching the blacksmiths hammer metal, he borrowed a hammer and battered his small red pedal car until it would no longer move. The men at the forge gently restored it to something near its former shape, though he felt it was never quite the same. Soon afterward, he was found beneath a horse, gravely watching the blacksmith burn the track of a new shoe onto the pared hoof. His grandmother scolded and beat him, kept him indoors for days, and then forbade him to return to the forge. The episode places the horse at the boundary between a child’s absorbing curiosity and the danger adults saw in the work; the animal’s hoof is both the focus of skilled labor and the reason the child is judged to have gone too close.

Work on the Farm

Horses also appear as active participants in the seasonal work of the fields. After the meadows were cut, the haycocks were drawn in with horses and built into ricks. Later, a jennet helped bring the stooked sheaves in from the oatfield and stack them near the hayrick. These tasks belong to a sequence of collective labor: workmen cut and bound the crop, gathered it, and stored it, while the horses provided the means of moving what had been harvested.

The threshing itself depended on a Ferguson tractor and a large red mill. The contrast is specific rather than a simple account of one kind of work replacing another: horses still draw haycocks and a jennet carries sheaves, while the tractor pulls the threshing machinery through the opened road gap. The recollection keeps animal power and farm machinery in the same working landscape. It also makes clear that harvest labor required many forms of effort, from moving the crop with horses to feeding sheaves into the whirling mill and building the straw into a rick.

Abandoned Horses and Rural Vulnerability

At the barracks in Cootehall, horses appear in a different circumstance. The police occasionally found old, starving animals abandoned on the roads and brought them onto the lawn, where they waited among its three circular flowerbeds until the Burnhouse lorry came. When it arrived, the animals were pushed or carried onto it and shot with a humane killer. The procedure was described as a response to their abandonment, but it also made their fate part of the ordinary work observed during the narrator’s childhood stay at the barracks.

The account distinguishes the sound of their deaths from that of donkeys: horses fell with a heavy thud, whereas the lighter donkeys crumpled onto the lorry floor as silently as leaves. That contrast gives the animals separate physical presence even in a brief, stark scene. Across the memoir, horses are encountered at a drinking pool, on the road, under the blacksmith’s hand, and in farm work; at Cootehall, they are instead helpless and waiting to be destroyed. Their recurrence holds together the usefulness of working animals and their exposure to neglect, while keeping the reader close to the concrete routines through which rural life depends on, and disposes of, animal bodies.