George's Place is more than a patch of grazing ground: for George Glenn’s flock, it becomes a memorial space, a forbidden pasture, and the ground on which they learn to defend their home together. The novel sets its Irish meadow against the economic and physical pressures surrounding it. Grass may seem plentiful, but who controls it, who may use it, and who is allowed to remain there are questions with consequences for both people and sheep.

Setting and Definition

The flock’s world is a green Irish pasture between the hay barn, the path through the fields, and the cliffs. When the sheep find George Glenn dead, he is lying in the grass beside the hay barn, with a spade sticking out of his body; the flock holds its meeting farther off, near the cliff edge. The distinction matters: the narrative establishes the wider pasture as the scene of discovery, while George's Place acquires its own identity as the ground the sheep are warned not to graze.

That prohibition gives the place a memorial character. Cloud rebukes Sir Ritchfield for grazing there, and the flock understands the pasture as something set apart for George. The sheep’s relationship to it is therefore not simply practical. Its grass is tempting precisely because it is theirs to eat in ordinary circumstances, yet eating this particular grass would violate a boundary made meaningful by George’s death.

Garden, Caravan, and Claims on the Land

The nearby caravan and vegetable garden show the ordinary, managed life that had occupied the pasture. Behind the rickety caravan, George had fenced a small garden of lettuces, peas, radishes, cress, tomatoes, endives, buttercups, and chives. His watchfulness, rather than any difficulty with the fence, had kept the sheep out. After his death, Lane pushes back the bolt; Maude, Cloud, and Heather eat their way through the buttercups, peas, and tomatoes. Their brief raid ends in silence and shame. Othello, who has not joined in, then leads Miss Maple to the caravan’s back wall, where the garden spade is missing.

The land also attracts human plans that have little to do with the flock’s needs. Harry the Sinner lists a Celtic cultural center, pony rides, a seaside hotel, and other possible businesses, while Josh doubts there is any contraband. Tom O’Malley describes George as having rejected a sale, driven tourists away, and fired a pistol to keep people off the land. He alleges that boats brought illicit goods to the beach at night, that they were taken to the caravan, and that George drove them away the next day. These are the villagers’ claims and suspicions, not a neutral description of the pasture: their talk reveals how quickly the death of its shepherd makes the land available, in their imaginations, for development and profit.

A Place of Memory and Prohibition

The flock’s fear of losing George extends into its understanding of belonging. Miss Maple considers the possibility that George left the human herd or was driven away from it, and that his death might be punishment for leaving. The sheep are horrified by the prospect that their own shepherd could have left his flock. In this way, George's Place gathers a question larger than grazing: whether leaving a community is a freedom, a betrayal, or a danger.

Sir Ritchfield’s confused encounter with his own apparent reflection sharpens that uncertainty. One Ritchfield stands with crows; the other stands without them. After the two rams clash horns, the one without crows recalls that he dared to leave, repeats the rule that no sheep may leave the flock, and says George came back smelling of death. He turns toward the cliffs; the crows rise, and only one Ritchfield remains. The episode makes the pasture a landscape of memory that is unstable rather than neatly resolved: departure, return, and George’s death surface together in the old ram’s bewilderment.

Ritchfield later offers Cloud a gentler-sounding but no less cryptic account of the place. He describes a journey over hills, fields, the old stone quarry, and the body, then insists that George’s true place is under the dolmen, where no grass grows and a blue-eyed shepherd waits. He links that hidden place to a key that must return to daylight. Cloud flees in confusion. The scene does not make his explanation a reliable map; instead, it shows how the flock’s rules, memories, and ideas about George become entangled with the physical land.

Defending the Pasture

When the flock fears that Gabriel’s sheep will graze George's Place bare, the memorial prohibition becomes an immediate practical crisis. Mopple the Whale names the danger, and the sheep recognize the irony: they have been forbidden to eat the grass that another flock may consume. Led by Mopple, they go to the pasture unsure how a meadow can be defended from grazing sheep.

Othello supplies the answer through collective positioning. The sheep form a circle, shoulder to shoulder, around George's Place, facing Gabriel’s flock, with Othello in the middle so he can lend a hoof wherever help is needed. The defense turns the boundary from a rule the flock merely obeys into one it actively maintains. Nearby, Gabriel takes George’s scythe from the toolshed and cuts grass at the foot of the hill, on the side facing away from the sea. The sheep watch him harvest without wanting the grass himself: the blade passes through it, leaving it flat and dead. Their response makes the meadow’s abundance newly precarious. Grass can be food, but it can also be cut, claimed, and withheld.

The Pasture’s Future

George’s promise to take his sheep to Europe gives their future a legal as well as a local dimension. His will leaves them money for the journey and requires an authorized representative to accompany them as shepherd. The representative must arrange for stories to be read aloud and comply with protections against selling or slaughtering the sheep; a third party is to check the conditions. When the lawyer asks who will take the position, Rebecca volunteers. Othello turns from Gabriel’s Gaelic entreaties and trots to Rebecca; the flock gathers around her. Their response makes clear that the future written into the will depends, in practice, on their own choice of whom to trust.

The setting’s pastoral image is thus continually tested. The green grass beside the hay barn supports the sheep, but the same landscape is desired as a tourist attraction, associated with allegations of smuggling, and threatened by another flock’s grazing. George's Place gives these competing uses a visible focus: what appears to be open countryside is also a site of memory, ownership, restriction, and collective action. The sheep’s circle around it is a small but decisive reversal. They are no longer only the creatures kept on the land; together, they stand guard over the place that binds them to George and to one another.