The period about seven years before George’s death

The period about seven years before George Glenn’s death is remembered through overlapping absences and silences. Wesley McCarthy’s murder and plans for a vast slaughterhouse unsettled the area while Beth was in Africa; when she returned, the campaign against the project had disappeared from view, and George had grown estranged from those around him. The interval is important less as a fully explained chapter of the past than as the point from which several unresolved histories begin to surface.

McCarthy’s Murder and Land Purchases

Wesley McCarthy was found murdered in the stone quarry about seven years before the events of the present-day investigation. An anonymous caller reported the body, but there were no suspects or arrests, and the case quickly vanished from the headlines. Beth, who was in Africa at the time, had not even heard of the murder until Rebecca brought it to her attention. Beth recognized the name immediately: people had called him Weasel McCarthy.

McCarthy had also been buying land bit by bit, starting next to the meadow and extending almost to the village. Local people sold because they had little money and few practical choices; by the time the implications became clear, McCarthy owned nearly everything around them. His intended project was to build what Beth described as the biggest slaughterhouse in Ireland. The threat reached beyond the immediate site: Beth believed the smell and animal transports would damage tourism, bed-and-breakfast businesses, and the Mad Boar, while local farmers might also lose a market for their meat. Yet the prospect exposed a conflict in the community’s opposition: people could resent McCarthy’s conduct and still be drawn to cheaper meat.

Beth’s Return from Africa

When Beth left for Africa, people were already urgently discussing ways to stop the slaughterhouse, including citizens’ action groups and petitions. By the time she returned, Whitepark was empty and she had heard nothing about McCarthy’s murder. The contrast between the public campaign before her departure and the silence she encountered afterward makes the intervening years feel abruptly erased: the threat and its opposition had both dropped out of her account of home.

Beth also connects her return, about seven years earlier, with a worsening change in George. She says she does not know what had happened then and does not want to know; since that time, he had not got on with anyone in the area or with God. At first she thought her own absence might explain his isolation, but later judged that explanation to be vanity. She recalls speaking to him at length without being heard, while leaving unsaid the one thing she had always wanted to tell him.

A Past That Remains Unresolved

The sheep hear Beth’s account after learning that McCarthy’s murder had gone unreported in her own understanding for years. Her recollection supplies context, but not a complete explanation of George’s decline: she explicitly does not know what happened during the period when things became worse. The interval therefore links a public mystery, the abandoned slaughterhouse campaign, and a private estrangement without proving that one caused another.

Beth’s final remark about what she never said sounds to the sheep as though she and George had discussed his death. They cannot make that impression fit what they know: they wonder how George could have known he was going to die, and why he would not have run away. The period about seven years before his death thus remains a threshold in the story rather than a settled answer—a time when important events occurred, but when memory, absence, and withheld knowledge leave their connections uncertain.