Poor soil and the preservation of the rural landscape

Poor soil and the preservation of the rural landscape describes a defining paradox of County Leitrim: ground too thin and wet to support rich cultivation helped protect small fields, old hedges, and wooded lanes from the large-scale remaking of farmland. The landscape’s continuity is not separate from its material limits. Its shallow soil, tangled boundaries, and slow-changing paths form a living system that John McGahern remembers from childhood and later chose as the setting for a home and a writing life.

The limits and life of the soil

The soil is sometimes no more than an inch deep. Beneath it lies either daub, a blue-grey modelling clay, or compacted gravel; neither readily absorbs the heavy rainfall. Rushes and wiry grasses grow densely enough to keep the thin clay from being washed away. The ground is therefore not simply an unproductive surface: its vegetation helps hold it together under conditions that might otherwise strip it bare.

The poor soil supports a particular mixture of wet ground, grasses, and pockets of richer land. Rushes and wiry grasses share the fields with wild orchid and windflower, while surprising islands of green limestone interrupt the otherwise difficult terrain. This variation gives the countryside its character without turning it into a uniformly fertile landscape. Its ecological richness exists alongside, and partly through, its agricultural poverty.

Fields, hedges, and living boundaries

Between the lakes, small fields are separated by thick hedges of whitethorn, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green oak, and sycamore. Narrow lanes pass between them beneath the Iron Mountains, often cut between high banks. The hedges do more than divide parcels of land: they shelter a dense community of plants and animals and are, in McGahern’s account, the glory of the fields.

Their appearance changes through the year. In May and June, hawthorn blossoms foam along the hedges; the sally is the first tree to green and the first to wither, while rowan berries glow orange in the light from the lakes each September. Mice, insects, and small birds live among the branches, where sparrowhawks hunt throughout the day. In summer evenings, wild woodbine and dog rose are fragrant; foxglove, wild strawberry, primrose, fern, and vetch grow on the banks among crawling briars. Seasonal change is conspicuous, but it takes place within a durable framework of fields and hedgerows.

The hedges also preserve signs of animal life. An otter’s beaten pass between the lakes can be followed along the banks. On quiet stretches at the water’s edge, small lawns are speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells, remains of places where an otter feeds and trains her young. These details make the landscape more than a backdrop to human memory: its banks, feeding places, and paths also belong to the animals that move through it.

Lanes and persistence

A maze of lanes connects houses scattered sparsely among the fields. The routes wander into one another like streams before reaching a main road, giving the countryside a dispersed pattern rather than a single central focus. They remain in use, and their banks can be so overgrown that trees join above the road. In full summer leaf, the branches form green tunnels pierced by vivid points of light. The lanes are both practical connections between houses and a distinctive way of experiencing the countryside from within it.

McGahern links the persistence of this landscape directly to the poverty of its soil. While old hedges and great trees were being levelled throughout Europe for factory farming, the small fields of County Leitrim remained largely intact. The same conditions that restricted agriculture helped shield the boundaries and trees from that transformation. The result is not an untouched wilderness, but a worked landscape whose older pattern survived amid wider change. McGahern says that the fields had hardly changed since he ran, played, and worked in them as a boy.

Return, home, and conflicting valuations

Thirty years before the memoir’s present, McGahern returned to live among these lanes with his wife. They were beginning their life together and thought they could make a bare living from the small fields while he wrote. They could have settled almost anywhere; if his wife had disliked the place and its people, they would have moved elsewhere. He liked it too, but recognized that his own preference carried a different weight because he came from these fields. The return therefore joins an attachment formed in childhood to a shared decision about where a new household could live.

His father described the purchase in markedly different terms, saying that his eldest son had bought a snipe run behind the Ivy Leaf Ballroom. The phrase reduces a home and farm to poor ground suitable for shooting. The farm was indeed small, a low hill between two lakes, and its soil was poor; but the father’s judgment also reflected the social world to which he belonged, among civil servants, teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen, and tillage inspectors. He considered the property a step down from that world, objected to its closeness to the mother’s relatives and the place where McGahern had grown up with her, and would have disapproved of the ballroom’s name.

The Ivy Leaf Ballroom also belonged to a locally rooted economy that unsettled the father’s view of the area. Built by Patsy Conboy with money made in America, it was first called Fenaghville, later became the Ivy Leaf, and prospered through the 1950s and into the 1960s despite denunciations from several pulpits. Conboy became a local hero by providing employment. People travelled to dance by bus, lorry, hackney car, horse trap, bicycle, and on foot; the ballroom’s success made it a public centre in the same landscape the father dismissed. In this contrast, poor soil signifies not only limitation but also a place whose value rests in habitation, memory, and local life rather than in the standards of professional status or intensive farming.