Glencullen Upper is a long sheltered glen where the Glencullen river runs down into Carrowmore Lake. For centuries this was booleying ground - buaile, in Irish - where farmers from beyond the parish drove their cattle up each summer to fatten on the mountain pasture. People from the Mullet Peninsula, miles away, brought their herds across to graze the high meadow at Barnaglanna and Bouleyanlobane. With the cattle came the herders, often young and unmarried, and Glencullen became a meeting place. Many Glencullen women married Kilcommon men they had first met during those summer months. The pattern of transhumance, ancient and pan-European, here had a romantic side effect: a network of marriages stitched through the surrounding parishes by the seasonal movement of cows.

The road from Glencullen to Bangor Erris was laid in 1847 during the Public Works for the Distress - the controversial relief schemes that gave starving people pickaxes and wages of pennies in exchange for building infrastructure that often led nowhere. This particular road cost £150. The men who broke its stones were trying to keep their families alive through the second winter of the Great Famine. The road is still there. So is much of the silence around it. Glencullen Lower in the nineteenth century held about forty houses within a two-mile radius. By the 2011 census, the entire townland had twelve residents. The cabins are gone, the families gone, the road still climbing the bog as evidence of what the survivors built to earn the meal that kept them alive.

The first record of formal teaching in Glencullen is from 1826, when a woman named Mary Shiels taught twenty-two pupils in any available place for a salary of four pounds a year. This was a hedge school - the informal Catholic alternative to the official Protestant-led system. In 1861 Friar Michael Munnelly built a thatched stone schoolhouse, and a year later the inspector John Sweeney rode out to assess it. He found the teacher, Thomas McNulty, of poor teaching ability but good character. McNulty governed the school well, Sweeney wrote, and no better candidate could be found. The pupils paid fees the teacher waived for the poorest. Sweeney recommended that the school be brought under the Board of Education on the condition that the walls be plastered before 15 March. They were, and the school was registered as Roll No. 8884.

By 1888 the original schoolhouse had been replaced with a larger building accommodating sixty pupils. From 1903 to 1909, the school ran evening classes for twenty-two men over eighteen years old, each studying two subjects. The grant for the teacher came to £14.5.0 a year - a small sum even by the standards of the time. At those evening classes, the men read newspapers and discussed what was happening in the world beyond Glencullen. They wrote letters to distant relatives - brothers in Boston, sisters in Chicago, cousins working the railroads of Pennsylvania. The literacy that the school provided was, for many, not the gateway to local employment but the means of staying in touch with families scattered across two continents. The schoolhouse is a holiday home now. The letters it helped to write are scattered through American archives.

Glencullen Lower and Glencullen Upper together cover almost five thousand acres of blanket bog, river valley, and small mountain - a vast space for the dozens of people who now live there. The bog itself is the largest archive of what has passed across this land: fossilised pine stumps, traces of Neolithic settlement, the scars of nineteenth-century turf cutting, the cleared sites of cabins emptied in the 1840s. Walk the road from Bangor towards Kilcommon on a clear summer evening and the silence is immense, broken only by the wind and the calls of the few birds that still nest here. The lake at the top of the glen is empty. The booleying cattle no longer climb. The school is closed. The land remembers what it has been asked to forget.