I travelled cross-country today from the west of Ireland where I live up to my home town in the border county of Monaghan. Now county Monaghan is never spoken of as a must-see tourist destination but it is a beautiful place. It has the kind of beauty that doesn’t shout at you but rather creeps up on you in its own quiet soft-spoken way. It is a rather special place geologically-speaking made up as it is of drumlins – little rounded hills that were dropped carelessly here and there by a passing glacier on its retreat northwards at the end of the last ice-age.
When I was younger I was more impressed by the drama of more mountainous terrain, and our little drumlins seemed very inadequate when compared to the broody peak of Croagh Patrick in Mayo or the wild and rugged Twelve Pins out in Connemara for example. I have since learned that size is not everything – and you don’t have to be big to be beautiful!
As I journey homeward to Monaghan the very flat land of East Galway and the midland counties of Roscommon and Longford gives way to more gentle hills, and soon I find myself in the midst of the Cavan and Monaghan drumlins. You cannot see very far in Monaghan as you are always surrounded by these wee hobbit sized hills, unless you climb to the top of one – which admittedly is not that hard to do. Where there are small hills there must be small hollows in between, and these tend to be either bogs or marshes, or little sparkling lakes.
So today I journeyed northward – to the small green fields that creep up the steep slopes of the drumlins, to the thorny hedges that separate one little field from its neighbour, to the sparkling lakes that catch you by surprise as you round a bend in the road, to the farmstead clusters of house and red-roofed sheds that nestle between the hills. The road beneath me twists and curls between these tiny peaks. I am home.
Faraway Fields 