Ireland provides the broad setting for the flock’s life at Glennkill, a landscape where green pasture and the sea seem to promise abundance but where land is also contested and animals are treated as property or food. The novel links the sheep’s immediate world to larger pressures: tourism development, alleged drug smuggling, plans for a vast slaughterhouse, and the threatened survival of an old Irish breed.

Pasture and coastline

The shepherd’s body is found on green Irish grass beside the hay barn, near a path through the fields, while the sheep meet farther off, close to the cliff edge. The contrast between the exposed human death and the flock’s gathering places Ireland’s pastoral landscape at the center of the mystery. The setting is not simply a peaceful backdrop: the animals’ first concern is how they will manage without their shepherd, and the absence of the tool that usually leans beside George Glenn’s caravan soon becomes significant.

The pasture’s richness is emphasized when Miss Maple argues that, in the greenest and richest pasture in Ireland, sheep have no need to eat hay in midsummer. The next day, the flock discovers George Glenn’s fenced vegetable garden behind his caravan. Once Lane pushes back the bolt, Maude, Cloud, and Heather graze the buttercups, peas, and tomatoes; within minutes, the carefully planted beds are gone. This small episode makes the cultivated plot part of the local landscape while distinguishing it from the open meadow: the sheep have plenty of grass, but George Glenn had kept this particular patch from them.

Land, development, and local interests

Ireland’s rural scenery is also valuable real estate. Local men discussing the contents of George Glenn’s caravan accuse him of dealing in drugs, describing boats bringing goods ashore by night and their transfer to the caravan before he drove away the next day. They connect the alleged trade to his refusal to sell or develop his land, which they believe could have made money as a seaside hotel or other tourist attraction. Their account is a claim made in conversation, not an independently established explanation of George Glenn’s death; it nevertheless shows how the land is viewed by people who see the sheep pasture as a missed commercial opportunity.

Beth recalls a still larger development scheme: the plan to build the biggest abattoir in Ireland at Whitepark. George Glenn had bought land bit by bit, first beside the meadow and then across much of the area toward the village. By the time opposition formed through citizens’ groups and petitions, Beth says, it was too late. She explains that a slaughterhouse threatened the tourist trade, including bed-and-breakfast businesses and The Mad Boar, while farmers might also lose a market for their meat. Her account reveals a local economy divided between resistance to outside development and dependence on the commerce it could bring.

Sheep and the Irish landscape

Ireland’s significance is made explicit when the lawyer identifies George Glenn’s flock as including a black four-horned Hebridean ram, a mountain Blackface, a merino, and mostly Cladoir sheep with some Blackface crosses. He calls them the last Cladoir flock in all Ireland and laments that the breed is no longer raised elsewhere. This announcement turns the flock from a group of beneficiaries under George Glenn’s will into a rare part of the country’s agricultural inheritance. The humans’ surprise gives way to undisguised hostility, and Gabriel examines the sheep critically: their status as heirs is entangled with their value as animals that can be managed, bred, or sold.

The pasture also exposes a conflict between human tools and animal experience. Gabriel takes George Glenn’s scythe from the toolshed and cuts grass for his own sheep. The flock has seen the implement before but never understood its purpose; George Glenn had said that people who kept sheep could spare themselves a scythe. In Gabriel’s hand, however, it sweeps through the meadow and leaves the grass flattened. The sheep see a human grazing without wanting to eat what he cuts, making the familiar Irish field appear newly vulnerable to deliberate destruction.

Place, memory, and competing stories

The novel’s Ireland is assembled through sharply different accounts rather than a single story of rural life. The green pasture is abundant enough to sustain the flock, yet the same land carries disputes over ownership, tourism, contraband, and industrial meat production. The sheep’s encounter with the garden, the allegations about night-time boats, Beth’s recollection of the proposed abattoir, and the lawyer’s identification of the last Cladoir flock each disclose another use or value assigned to the countryside.

A story Rebecca tells the sheep gives the national setting a more intimate human history. In it, a girl has a secret father and an unsecret father; after a quarrel and a long silence, a letter says the secret father intends to travel to Europe and wants to see her. The girl hides her joy and keeps him waiting, and he dies waiting for her. The tale does not name Ireland, but it resonates with the family history being disclosed among people living there. Against the larger histories of land and commerce, it brings the landscape’s central mystery back to personal estrangement and loss.