DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I CROSSED A FIELD one morning last week, outside Mullingar, with a Cavan man in a black three-piece suit and a peaked cap. The morning was cloudless, but bracingly cold, writes Michael Harding.

He was guiding me up the Hill of Ushnagh, to the Cat-stone, a monumental rock where pagans once held spring festivals and where Daniel O'Connell, with his back to the hill and his face to the crowd, once spoke like an angel for over an hour.

"There's no broadband in Leitrim," my guide declared. "Is that why you left?" I said, "Yes; more or less." He said: "There was a Leitrim man one time, who became bishop in Cavan.

"And when he got the job, the Leitrim people bought him an Audi, so that he could swank around like the other prelates.

"But the new bishop registered the vehicle in Cavan because he didn't want to be seen driving through the lush lawns of his adopted county, with Leitrim registration plates. Doesn't that say it all?"

I said: "That surely says it all."

From the high ground, we could survey the flat plains of Westmeath, and so far beyond, that it felt like we were embracing the entire island.

My guide expressed the opinion that Cavan would never rejoin the Commonwealth.

"Mullingar would be in like a shot," he said, "but there isn't much hope for the territory beyond the bridge of Finea; beyond that point," he said, "you're walking on lakes."

A man called Myles the Slasher once slaughtered scores of yeomen on Finea bridge with a single sword, just to keep them out of Cavan. And when settlers eventually established a Cathedral in Cavan, and wrote the Bible in Irish to woo the natives, the locals burned the strangers' houses, and sent them off walking to Dublin, in the middle of winter, after stripping them down to their naked pelts.

"No," he said, "there's no chance of Cavan rejoining the Commonwealth." My guide parked his bottom on a stone and took in the world. I was wondering did he ever change his clothes; I imagined him in the same suit for decades; scything the fields in the heat of June, and licking the frost off choc ices in August, with perspiration dripping down his cheeks. Or did he ever wear the suit in bed, on winter nights, to keep his bones from freezing?

A family of rusty brown cattle with yellow ear tags, dozed in a field below us. He said: "The problem with Cavan is the drumlins. The horizon is always a few feet away. You go round in circles to get to where you started from.

"That's why the supermarkets in Cavan are so confusing; Mullingar supermarkets are beautiful," he declared. "People move in the one direction. But in Cavan," he said, "it's higgledy-piggledy, like the bumping cars long ago in Bundoran."

We sat beside the Cat-stone and took in the view, like ancient kings or poets might have done in their day. Being in the middle of the world, we were also on top of the world and we felt like gods pulling strings, as we spoke of the weekend car crashes, the murders in Limerick, and all the people dying of diseases.

"There's not many escape in their sleep," he said, "or dozing, or dreaming of biscuits." His people originated in Westmeath, but his grandmother moved to Cavan. He still remembered her; a white-haired woman in black shawls, with a chin that would split hailstones; she put turf into the flames with bare hands, and she spent her old age remembering the dead; the lovely young boys who died on the roads, and the old dotes who never woke up for their porridge; those that were found dead in drains, or were squashed by the plough or were mangled by the combined harverster, or were cut from their motor cars by weeping firemen.

And despite the blue sky at the top of the hill, my guide was engulfed in shadows.

We descended the hill as silent men, trying not to disturb the quiet cows, and having examined the world as poets would, we felt a great surge of vitality.

If my guide was a king, he might have lit a great fire, there on the hill, to scatter the shadows. But he was a simple man, and so he just turned his face, without a word, to the journey home, through Crookedwood and Castlepollard, and to the slopes of a drumlin, beyond the bridge of Finea.