The woods at Derrycasson Forest are lovely, dark, and deep. Poet Robert Frost never saw them, but years before he wrote his poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, another man with promises to keep walked there with a local woman called Kitty.
The woods feel magic, somehow outside ordinary calculations of time. Fresh summer branches soar, escaping the tamer boundaries of the old Dobbins estate, then stagger open-handedly down to the shore of Lough Gowna, their trunks trailing acorns and wild mushrooms almost to the water's edge. Birds twitter in tall trees sheltering tiny animals who scatter at the twig-snap-squelch of a human foot. It is a place for dreaming.
The man last walked there almost 76 years ago, dreaming dreams for marriage and for Ireland. Michael Collins was his name. Ireland happened, if not quite as he had imagined it would. But two months before he was due to marry Kitty Kiernan, in a double wedding with her sister, Maud, he was murdered at Beal na Blath near his home in west Cork. His anniversary is on Saturday. Kitty's home town, Granard, never exploited its special historical connection with Michael Collins. There are no memorials, few signs to indicate that this was Collins's second home, as writer Frank O'Connor put it in his 1937 biography, The Big Fellow. Only a bar called after him and a restaurant named for Kitty Kiernan at her childhood home, The Greville Arms Hotel, signals this era of the town's complex history.
Older locals know that Collins used to take early morning breathers at the Moat, a former motte-and-bailey structure at the top of the town, or climb through a door called "the hole in the wall" at Kitty's place to dance upstairs in the Buttermart next door. Younger folk know Liam Neeson better.
"How I wish I were there now - on the Moat, early morning, do you remember?" Collins wrote to Kitty during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921, his words specially loved by Margo Gearty, Kitty's niece, who is the last Kiernan in Granard.
Interest in Collins and Kiernan increased recently, especially after the release of Neil Jordan's film starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts almost two years ago. Now, a local action group is to examine the old Buttermarket as a possible home where people can explore the story of Granard, and its link to one of Ireland's best-loved leaders. The flora and fauna at Derrycasson Forest are being studied by a feasibility group with the aim of conserving its riches and providing nature walks. Urged on by the work of the Tidy Towns Committee, local shop fronts are being restored for the first time in years, their impact enhanced by a team of 25 FAS workers rebuilding crumbling walls and making waste ground green.
"We started four years ago because we wanted to improve the look of the town and try to develop its employment and tourism potentials," says Brid White, who chairs the action group, and runs a pharmacy in Granard. "Derrycasson is our first major project and we hope it will attract local, national and international funding. But the Buttermarket is next on our agenda: it will be discussed in principle at the next meeting of Longford County Council, so we are hoping they will help us to realise its potential as a centre for the area." Collins's first recorded trip to Granard was in 1917, when he was campaigning in a bye-election on behalf of a Sinn Fein prisoner, Joseph McGuinness. Eamon de Valera had not agreed with that selection, but McGuinness was narrowly elected in what became a significant taste of the party's later role. It was then Collins stayed at the Greville Arms, where he met Kitty, her sisters and her brother, Larry, for the first time. The siblings had taken over running the hotel some years after their parents' premature deaths.
Chris Flood bought the Greville Arms just over a year ago, and immediately stared to collect Collins memorabilia. So far, she has rescued the bathroom fittings of one of his safe houses in Dublin. She has refurbished its bar and restaurant, and hopes to open eight rooms for overnight guests next year. "There's a huge interest in the Granard connection, especially among Northerners and Americans," she says.
The town's roots have always combined commerce and culture, being torn down and starting all over again - it is mentioned in the Tain and in many of the annals. St Patrick built a church here, and its thriving medieval settlements now lie unexcavated having been sacked by Robert the Bruce in 1315. Its recent history includes the tragedy of Anne Lovett, whose death made Granard the whipping boy for the guilt of a whole nation. The people suffered, comforted her family, and tried to move on.