Qualla: County Leitrim

County Leitrim: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a particular Irish kind of melancholy that belongs to County Leitrim. It has the smallest population of any county in Ireland - thirty-five thousand people, fewer than fit into a single small Dublin suburb. It has the shortest coastline of any Irish county that touches the sea: four and a half kilometres at the village of Tullaghan, an embarrassed sliver of beach between the larger frontages of Sligo and Donegal. And uniquely among Irish counties, there is no road that lets you cross from North Leitrim to South Leitrim without leaving the county - Lough Allen and the River Shannon cut it in half, and the only way around is through somewhere else. For most of the twentieth century, Leitrim was a byword for rural decline. Its population in 1841 had been one hundred and fifty-five thousand. By the 1990s it had fallen to twenty-five thousand. Today, finally, it has Connacht's fastest-growing population - and the highest rate of young people going to university of any county in Ireland.

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County Leitrim: Tree to Tree by Branches

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 trav...

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County Leitrim: The Famine and After

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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County Leitrim: Glencar and The Stolen Child

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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County Leitrim: Saints, Soldiers and Songwriters

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 188...

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