Leitrim is portrayed as a country of poor soil and intricate boundaries whose physical limits shaped both local life and the landscape’s survival. Thin fields, rain-carved lanes, and an upland community’s hard-won subsistence make the region more than a setting: its poverty becomes a force that preserves the countryside, while its paths and houses hold the memoirist’s memories of home.

Land and soil

In places, the soil is no more than an inch deep, resting on blue-grey modelling clay or compacted gravel that cannot absorb the heavy rain. Rushes and wiry grasses hold the thin covering in place. Between the lakes, small fields lie under the Iron Mountains, divided by thick hedges and linked by narrow lanes, often banked high against the surrounding ground.

The hedges give the fields their distinctive character. Whitethorn, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green oak, and sycamore grow among them. Hawthorn blossom streams through the landscape in May and June; sally greens early and withers early, while rowan berries glow orange in the September light from the lakes. Mice, insects, and small birds live in the hedges, and sparrowhawks hunt above them. In summer evenings, wild woodbine and dog rose scent the branches; primrose, fern, vetch, foxglove, and wild strawberry grow along the banks among the briars.

The landscape also includes richer exceptions to its general barrenness: islands of green limestone, and wild orchids and windflowers among the rushes and grasses. Along the lakeshore, the tracks and feeding places of Otters along the lakeshore mark an animal life threaded through the same banks and hedges as the human paths.

Fields, lanes, and settlement

A maze of lanes connects houses scattered sparsely among the fields, each lane wandering into another like a stream before reaching a main road. Some remain enclosed by high-bank hedges whose trees meet and tangle overhead. In full summer leaf, these passages become green tunnels punctured by points of light. The memoirist describes them not as remnants detached from daily life but as lanes still in use.

In the uplands above Corleehan Church, the fields were poorer still. Rock and bare gravel appeared between the rushes on the hill behind the house, where a trout stream ran through small pools. A few boggy meadows below yielded potatoes, turnips, cabbage, and winter fodder. The names in this part of the mountain—McManus, McGovern, McGirl, and Maguire—were Northern, and many of the families were related.

The community’s history is bound to displacement and adaptation. Generations earlier, some of its families had been weavers in the North, where their looms were broken and their houses burned amid organized violence after they undercut established Protestant weavers. They fled west and south, eventually settling on slopes once considered too poor to support a population. Thin seams of coal and iron had been mined there sporadically for generations, but the families’ lives depended above all on resourcefulness, thrift, and care. Even after some relatives became comfortable, they continued to reject extravagance and self-indulgence.

Houses and local memory

A road climbing into the mountains from Corleehan was often torn by floods. From it, a narrow lane between low whitethorns led to the memoirist’s grandmother’s house. Primroses, vetch, blueberries, and wild strawberries grew along its banks; the memoirist connects this lane with his mother’s love of lanes.

At the lane’s end stood a three-room cottage, in contrast with a nearby large, two-storeyed slated house whose owners had made money from gravel pits and contracting. Jimmy, the narrator’s uncle, thatched a seventh of the cottage roof each year, so its strips showed different shades of black, brown, and fresh gold. The cottage’s thick walls were whitewashed, with climbing roses at either end. These precise domestic details make the upland landscape legible as lived-in country: its poverty is recorded not only in poor fields but in the steady work of maintaining a home.

Return and preservation

The memoirist returned to live among Leitrim’s lanes thirty years before the time of writing, beginning a life with his wife. They believed they could make a bare living from the small fields while he wrote. They might have settled elsewhere if she had disliked the place and its people; he also liked it, though his attachment carried the added force of having come from those fields.

The very poverty that made cultivation difficult also helped preserve the countryside. While old hedges and great trees were being levelled across Europe for factory farming, these fields remained largely unchanged. The memoirist measures that continuity against his own childhood there, when he ran, played, and worked among them. Leitrim’s landscape thus holds together material constraint and lasting value: the thin soil resisted abundance, but its hedges, lanes, and small fields endured amid wider change.