Despite its many changes, the farming community in Co Sligo where Carol Coulter grew up retains its friendly and solicitous atmosphere
One of the features of growing up on a farm in Co Sligo was the gradual extension of the boundaries of home as I grew older. They were set, successively, by the fences surrounding the 30-acre farm where I roamed freely, the townland in which it was situated, where all the neighbours were known since infancy, the local village of Curry, just within walking distance, and the town of Tubbercurry, five miles away, where I went to school, and where my mother was the teacher in the small Church of Ireland school.
A small river ran along the bottom edge of our farm. It joined with a tributary of the Moy; and Curry, consisting of a church, a school and three pubs-cum-grocery shops, lay in a curve of this river a mile and a half away. A makeshift swimming pool was fashioned out of a wide and still part of this river, and in the summers, we swam in the brown water, feeling the mud squelching between our toes.
The deeper and faster-flowing river at the edge of our land was seen by the older members of my family as dangerous, and whenever a child had not been seen for a while my grandmother, who lived with us, would cry, "The river!", and a search would begin. But we knew better than to go to it unaccompanied, and were usually found safely playing with the dog or one of the cats who lived outside.
When I was very young, this river would flood in the winters, and the whole family would be mobilised to herd the cattle and sheep away from it to higher ground, in case they drowned. Then it was drained, and the flooding stopped.
As small children, we knew all the households in the townland, and wandered freely from house to house, usually with my father, always welcomed with a share in whatever was going. The sharing extended to horses for mowing or ploughing, agricultural implements and days' labour, and we grew up in a community based on mutual dependency and shared responsibility.
One day when I was about five, and my sister was two-and-a-half, I noticed my father had gone off without us, and decided we would follow him. I finally found him in the Gradys' house, about a mile away. I had helped my sister on with her shoes, but put them on the wrong feet, so she was crying with tiredness and discomfort by the time we got there. I was delighted with my independence, but our departure had generated panic back at the house, only brought to an end by one of the neighbours cycling back with the news that we were safe.
Apart from school, our trips to "the town" of Tubbercurry were limited to the weekly shopping expedition on Saturdays, and a visit to church on Sundays. Our family had one of the few cars in the area, and sometimes my father would take neighbours to town, or collect their messages.
When all the groceries had been bought, we would get sweets or an ice- cream. On the rare occasions when my father went into a pub, we would be perched on a stool with a "mineral", and sometimes the publican would give us a bar of chocolate from the adjoining shop, while the weather and the state of the hay or the harvest were exhaustively discussed by the adults.
In my memory, all the summers were sunny then, as we children worked, or pretended to work, in hayfields or brought turf home from the bog with the pony. Sometimes, if it was a really good day, my mother would say, "We'll go to Enniscrone," and, leaving my father at his work, we'd all pack into the car, take the narrow, tortuous road around Lough Talt and over the mountains, and reach one of the best beaches in Ireland.
I left Rathmagurry at the age of 11 to take up a scholarship at a school in Dublin, followed by college there. For the next decade or so, my year was punctuated by regular train journeys from Amiens Street station to Ballymote.
After Carrick-on-Shannon, I would collect my bags together and have them ready. As the train left Boyle, I would station myself and the bags by the door and open the window down fully, leaning out into the rushing air as the train travelled the final 20 miles of my journey. Trees and houses became familiar as the train neared the station, and I would be waving already as I spotted my parents waiting on the platform.
For those first few years, when I reached the house, I rushed to reacquaint myself with the big, clever, loyal collie - who had so intensely mourned my first departure, and was hysterical with joy at my every return - and with the pony and other animals, as much as with my family.
But as the years passed, the pony died; and the dog, who was given to illicit hunting trips after his day's work, escaped for one nocturnal expedition too many, and never came back. Other dogs came to our house, but never replaced in my affections the constant companion of my childhood.
As I grew older, I developed other interests, and my world came to centre more on my friends in Dublin and the activities I was involved in there, not always to local approval. I remember after a particular Labour Party conference in the 1970s, when my critical comments about Limerick TD Stevie Coughlan had been widely reported in the national press, the then local Church of Ireland minister took my mother aside to commiserate with her on the direction her promising daughter had taken.
Yet Rathmagurry was always a sanctuary. Even now, driving back there, as I leave Co Roscommon and see the familiar landscape in front of me, the Ox mountains on the horizon, with the flat stretch of boggy land in between, all as much a part of my visual memory as a familiar face, I have a sense of homecoming that four decades in Dublin has not erased.
Every family there has a car now, and no one needs a lift to the town, there are no horses to share in the ploughing, and mowing is done by huge silage-makers; but the sense of inter-dependency among people has not lessened. Old people are visited and looked after by their younger neighbours. People are still bound together by shared memories of help given and received, and a shared etiquette, one it takes generations to acquire, as the occasional German family who moves in to the area discovers.
While I was at college, and later working in Dublin, most of my contemporaries in Co Sligo were leaving to work in England or the US. The area was littered with empty and abandoned houses as the older generation died and was not replaced. That changed in the 1990s. A few of the houses around Curry are empty or abandoned, but they have been replaced and supplemented by new ones. These are inhabited, in the main, not by people moving out from the town but by the returned children of the now elderly local farmers, who care for their relatives and each others' children in the local community. For the first time in 80 years, the area is not ravaged by emigration.
Much, of course, has changed. The Church of Ireland National School in Tubbercurry finally succumbed to falling numbers, and closed recently. Ironically, this coincided with the opening of one of the most modern secondary schools in the country, Tubbercurry Community School, replacing two local convents and the already-closed "tech". This, and the long establishment of free secondary education, means that no child now needs to leave at age 11 to go to school in Dublin.
There is a good Indian restaurant in the town now, along with a Chinese take-away. The most exotic produce is available in the huge Supervalu supermarket, which also boasts a prize-winning off- licence. Yet it is still possible to go into the pub I sat in with my father and buy a bar of chocolate for my nine-year-old son perched on the stool beside me.
When I go home now, it is to an empty house rather than to a working farm, but the welcome from neighbours is as warm as it was in the 1960s. The roads are better, the agricultural methods have changed, but the familiar line of mountains to the west and the quality of the evening silence are still the same.