A nineteenth-century county survey makes one of those small claims that summons up an entirely vanished world: 'a hundred years ago almost the whole country was one continued, undivided forest, so that from Drumshanbo to Drumkeeran, a distance of nine or ten miles, one could travel the whole way from tree to tree by branches.' Five great forests are traditionally said to have stood in Leitrim. They are gone, almost all of them - cut for charcoal to fuel the iron-working at Sliabh an Iarainn, the Iron Mountain. Working of the county's rich iron-ore deposits began in the fifteenth century and continued until the mid-eighteenth, and the last coal mine in the area, at Arigna on the Roscommon border, closed only in July 1990. The medieval shape of the county was the western half of the Kingdom of Breifne, ruled by the O'Rourke family of Dromahair; their heraldic lion still occupies the official county shield. In the thirteenth century Breifne split into East (now Cavan) and West (now Leitrim). The Normans invaded in the same century and were beaten back at the Battle of Ath an Chip in 1270. In 1620, much of the county was confiscated and granted to English settlers - the so-called Leitrim Plantation - although the planting failed to take and the population remained overwhelmingly Gaelic and Catholic.

By 1841 the population had risen to 155,000 - dense beyond what the land could really support. Then came the Great Famine. By 1851 the count was down to 112,000. Emigration to Britain and America continued for another century and a half. By 1996 the population had bottomed out at 25,000 - down nearly eighty-five percent from the pre-Famine figure. There is hardly another county anywhere in western Europe with that scale of long-term decline. The wounds are still visible in the landscape: scattered ruined cottages overgrown with hawthorn, abandoned famine villages, the small empty plots and stone fences of a land that once held seven times more people. Things have started to turn. Since 2002 the population has risen by 36% to over 35,000 - now the fastest-growing in Connacht. The 2005 Higher Education statistics flagged Leitrim as having the highest rate of higher-education participation in Ireland, with 75% of 17- to 19-year-olds going on to college. The Book of Fenagh, the most famous medieval manuscript originating here, is being studied again. Carrick-on-Shannon is the boom town of the Shannon waterway. Drumshanbo's Shed Distillery, opened in 2014, has become a quietly enormous craft-spirits success.

W. B. Yeats spent the turn of the twentieth century fascinated by Leitrim. Glencar Waterfall, eleven kilometres from Manorhamilton, falls down a wooded cleft into Glencar Lough and gave him the haunting refrain of his 1886 poem The Stolen Child: 'Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car...' The Yeats geography of County Sligo - Innisfree, Knocknarea, Drumcliff - bleeds across the border into the lakes and hills of North Leitrim. The county's most famous twentieth-century writer was John McGahern, born in Dublin but raised on a small farm near Cootehall and Carrick-on-Shannon. McGahern's quiet, severe novels - Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun - are set in Leitrim and depict its small rural lives with a clarity and tenderness that turned the county into one of the most precisely-rendered landscapes in modern Irish literature. He died in 2006 and is buried in the small graveyard at Aughawillan.

The county's roll-call is far longer than its population would predict. The blind harpist Turlough O'Carolan, born in 1670, learned his music in this country. Sean Mac Diarmada, one of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic, was born at Kiltyclogher in 1883 and executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol in May 1916; the GAA stadium in Carrick-on-Shannon is named for him. The Methodist preacher Robert Strawbridge - one of the founders of American Methodism - was born at Drumsna in 1732 and emigrated to Maryland. Margaret Haughery, born in Carrigallen in 1813, became 'Margaret of New Orleans,' the mother of the orphans, and was the first woman in the United States to be honoured with a public statue. The actor Patrick McGoohan of The Prisoner had family from Leitrim. The Eurovision-winning songwriter Charlie McGettigan has lived in Drumshanbo since 1973. Today the comedian Katherine Lynch and the construction billionaire Ray O'Rourke both trace their roots here. The county is still small, still emptier than it once was, and still - quietly - producing more than its share.