‘The people got very scarce’: A life lived in a vanishing Leitrim townland

In a quiet corner of North Leitrim, a stone’s throw from the Cavan border on a dead-end road, 96-year-old James Flanagan has spent his life in his native townland of Shass.

Where once there were lively homes, rambling houses, and neighbours’ homes along the hilltops, now only James, his wife, and one other man, a Cork native, living down the road, remain.

Born in September 1934, one of eight in his family, James saw most of his siblings emigrate to America and England, like so many from this part of the country. As the oldest, he stayed behind, farming the land, selling cattle, and doing a spell with the ESB.

James points out his window to the hills around, and where old houses stood - some gone, some hidden in overgrowth, and the rest left derelict with no one left living in them. Except for maybe a few cats, he quips, still lively and quick-witted at 96.

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James himself lives with his wife and his little terrier dog in a house he had built around half a century ago at the bottom of a steep grassy hill he walks up daily to feed his cattle, and next to an ash tree his brother planted around sixty years ago, which stood until last week.

In his time, the land itself hadn’t changed much, except for the many forests that he saw grow up around, and the loss of many local people.

“This part of the country is about the worst in the whole country,” he remarks of the forestry. “They have got more in Leitrim than they were entitled to; they got more in Leitrim than they did in any other county.”

“There used to be five houses with people in every one of them in this townland,” he says. “Now there is only this house here, and one man living up the road, and that is all that is living here.”

He remembers a time when there were ten houses filled with people in the adjoining townland of Alteen. Now there’s just one — and that belongs to a holidaymaker.

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There used to be over 100 people living in the Shass and Alteen, according to the 1911 census.

His memory of Shass is long, he remembers hard times. He recalls the rations during World War Two, and the Big Snow in the infamous winter of 1947, where a neighbour of his lost hundreds of sheep in the piles of snow.

It was a time of little or no electricity, few cars, and plenty of work to be at. “This time of the year, you would be on the bog, it would be time to go at the hay. You would always have something to do, and the more you looked for, the more you would get.”

Yet even then, help was never far away, with neighbours close at hand. “If you had a beast in a hole back then, men would come from every direction. You wouldn’t have to leave the townland.”

He has noticed the place getting quieter in recent times. “These last ten years, it got worse and worse,” he says. In Dowra, only a few miles away, he recalls counting nine pubs in his youth. “Now there’s one — and it wouldn’t be there at all only for the mart.”