Leitrim village links two different movements toward home: Francis McGahern’s transfer there as a married Garda, which he abandoned by retiring, and John McGahern’s later return to the surrounding countryside, where he and Madeline Green bought a small farm. The village therefore marks both a family decision deferred and a return deliberately made.

Setting and connection to Cootehall

Leitrim village was only four miles from Cootehall, close enough that a transfer there would have allowed Francis to remain within the family’s established orbit. It was also the place remembered for an earlier encounter with a white bullock lying in the middle of the road. That detail gives the location a prior presence in the family story before it becomes the proposed destination of Francis’s final posting.

Francis McGahern’s proposed transfer

Garda regulations required guards to be transferred within twelve months of marrying a local woman. Francis managed to postpone the move for years, probably through appeals that cited his age, his record, and the young children still at school. When postponement was no longer possible, he was assigned to Leitrim village. The posting appeared unusually accommodating: its living quarters were spacious and comfortable; Dympna and Frankie would not have to change schools; and Francis could continue working his new farm while preparing the house for retirement.

The transfer was formally marked at a function in the parochial hall, where Francis and Agnes received a going-away present. Yet, a few weeks before he was due to move, he changed course and retired, taking up permanent residence at The Nurseries instead. The transfer thus remained a destination arranged but never reached. Almost immediately, Francis regretted his decision and began to resent it, making Leitrim a point of contrast between the future he had been offered and the choice he had made.

John McGahern’s return to the area

Years later, John McGahern and Madeline Green drove to Leitrim and looked over the many small farms for sale. They found a low hill with small fields and tall, thick hedges behind the Ivy Leaf Ballroom. The stone cottage there was restored and extended, and they bought a few cows for the fields. John McGahern found that earning a living from his writing was easier than he had expected; he and Madeline did not have to leave for England or America, except by choice, and were never away for long.

A chosen homecoming

For John McGahern, the return to Leitrim belonged to a larger return to the lanes, fields, hedges, and lakes beneath the Iron Mountains where he had grown up. The memoir presents the surrounding countryside not simply as a property or a picturesque setting, but as a place whose people, language, and landscape had become as familiar to him as breathing. Against Francis’s frustrated, uncompleted transfer, the later purchase represents a homecoming made possible through the narrator’s work and chosen life.