The Mill o’Louth. Smell Bacon. The Stone Trough. I touch these three keys and immediately my native district comes alive in my imagination. The first and third are the names of well-known landmarks. But who would guess that the middle one is a man’s nickname? How hopeless are the nicknames that one finds in fiction!

“Smell Bacon” is a real ballad nickname, flat and surprising like the names in American folk songs. They are never “poetical”, which means that they are poetry.

The Mill o’Louth, which stands off the road from Carrickmacross to Dundalk, occupies a great place in local lore. It is associated with the Prophecies of St Columcille. Something apocalyptical, its wheel was to be driven round with human blood when the Great (never clearly defined) Battle took place. Things of the imagination pass into a penumbra in this way.

Many’s the time I heard the story from poor oul’ Pether the Bodagh. Those were wonderful stories for a child’s imagination. The Stone Trough was – and still is, needless to say – exactly halfway between my native village of Inniskeen and Dundalk. It was an important landmark in the not-so-long-ago-days of the horse-drawn vehicle. Going to Dundalk in a cart was a big adventure. The world was an enormous place; it took a good-stepping horse two hours and a half to make the journey. We had three ways of going to Dundalk and there was a dispute as to which was the shortest.

We could go by Ballykelly, or by the Chanonrock Road, or the Low Road by Hackballscross. The first two roads brought us past “Smell Bacon’s” shop. I remembered the nickname “Smell Bacon”, or rather I had my memory awakened to it by a barman in Mooney’s in Fleet Street, London, not long ago. This barman was from the same district, and, if he had presented me with a complete film of our mutually native fields, he could not have brought the place more vividly before me than by this nickname.

As he uttered that magic incantation, it was a summer Sunday and I was leaning over the handlebars of my bicycle beside “Smell’s” shop, talking to, or at least listening to, a group of young fellows who were tossing ha’pence. And I remember the Sunday, years earlier, when we all went up to play football in a meadow belonging to the same “Smell”. Although the excitement of this district for me is mostly subjective and emotional, it has also some more obvious claims on our attention.

Very little has been written about it in recent years, yet Farney, in South Monaghan, is one of the few places in Ireland which has an indigenous literature, as anyone can see who reads the Gaelic stories collected by Henry Morris. There were poets in this area and though they were not great poets they absorbed the little fields and lanes and became authentic through them. For that is the way the poet’s mind works.

No poet ever travelled in search of beauty. No poet ever looked at a scene and cried “Wonderful”. Memorable beauty comes to us obliquely while we are going about our troubled business, WH Davies wrote:
What is this life if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
But Davies was wrong:
What is this life if NOT full of care
We do not let the cart-tracks stare
Into our hearts with love’s despair?

This pursuit of beauty is one of the defects of the tourist’s point of view. The tourist is in a hurry; he demands quick returns of the picturesque and the obvious. But for all that it is possible even when we pursue beauty or happiness to come upon oblique references to it. The job is to recognise them in the hurry. Not everybody can have the fields and lane stare at him as they stare at a man driving a cow to a fair.

Farney has other claims to fame. I once heard Joseph Hone, the biographer of Yeats and many other famous men, say that the view from the top of Maracloone Hill, south-east of Carrickmacross, was the most exciting view he had ever encountered. But I wasn’t thinking of that – Farney has had its history written. The author was Philip Shirley.

This history of Farney is a subsidiary of Shirley’s larger History of Monaghan, which is considered one of the greatest local histories ever written. But Shirley’s Farney is an even greater history, for it is the intimate history of fields and lanes and the private lives of rocks. It has that wonderful validity which we find in local newspapers. It is also a history of Ireland in microcosm.

This Shirley, who was a landlord, was undoubtedly a remarkable man, and notwithstanding Sir Shane Leslie’s efforts, he deserves to be more seriously considered. He was intelligent enough when working on his histories to get the services of the great O’Donovan to look after the Gaelic scholarship side.

Shirley, who lived just over a century ago, rescued from oblivion a valuable part of the native heritage and deserves our profound affection. He tells stories of the McMahons, the chiefs of Farney, who are not as well known as the O’Neills or O’Donnells; but for me, as their deeds filtered through my boyhood imagination, they loom large and mysterious.

McMahon and his 16 sons once rode into the town of Louth on 16 white horses. They had a residence – or so the story went – up the lane upon which I lived, and I often searched among the rocks hoping I might find some memory of their lives. The tomb of the McMahons is in the village of Inniskeen beside a round tower, and there remained in the legends of their lives something not merely noble but mystical.

And once again it is a summer Sunday afternoon in my imagination, and I am on my bicycle passing over the Fane Bridge. The Fane river, which runs through this village, is considered one of the best trout streams in Ireland, though the only fishing I ever did there was salmon-poaching. One of my most memorable bicycle tours used to be by the Low Road via Hackballscross or Annavackey.

Ahead of me lie the fields of South Armagh with Slieve Gullion in the hollow. To my right is Dundalk and it is that way I go down a tree-lined road to Killcurry and Faughart and up through Ravensdale. Ravensdale, north of Dundalk, is at least as delightful in the usual picturesque sense as South Dublin and Wicklow. A limestone country full of history, it is one of the pillars of the Gap of the North looking over Cooley and the magic setting of the Táin.

I cycle home through the Palin of Muirthemne, past “Smell Bacon’s” again, down by Ballykelly and the undulating narrow road from the Bohar Bhee – the Yellow Road. Over there on the edge of the Red Bog lived the Bard of Callenberg. The Bard was a great character; though he did me no good when it was first discovered that I was addicted to versing.

Everyone thought that I would turn out like the Bard – a rapscallion, a scandalmonger making rhymes about the neighbours. Remember the rhyme he made about our local grocer.
The welkin was ringing
And off I went singing
For in Inniskeen I’m well pleased for to be,
But in less than an hour
Male, pollard and flour
Was whipped off me cart by consaitey Magee.
The Bard hadn’t the money to pay for the stuff!


From The Word, August 1962