The Precise Geography of Nowhere in Particular

There is a field outside Callan that does not appear on any ordnance survey map worth consulting, though it appears on every mental map held by anyone who grew up within four miles of it. Locals call it Devereux's Acre, which is wrong on both counts — the Devereux family haven't owned it since 1987, and it runs to nearly three. But accuracy has never been the point of a place name in South Kilkenny. The point is that everyone knows, and knowing is its own form of ownership.

The field sits in a shallow bowl between two drumlin shoulders, and in February it fills with a standing water that reflects the sky with an almost offensive sincerity. Crows work the margins. A rusted harrow has been sinking slowly into the far corner for as long as anyone can remember, and there is a particular pleasure, among those who know the field, in watching visitors notice the harrow and decide not to mention it, uncertain whether it is art or negligence. It is neither. It is just a harrow that someone left.

The road that passes it has no official name but is called locally the Back of Somewhere, which tells you everything about how the people around here feel about official nomenclature. There are seven houses on it. Four of them are occupied by people whose grandparents were neighbours. The other three contain, respectively: a German couple who arrived in 2009 and are by now more Callan than anyone will admit, a woman from Tipperary who has been forgiven for this over decades of reliable attendance at funerals, and a man from Cork whose position remains, diplomatically, under review.

On the morning this story concerns itself with, which is a Tuesday in late October, a thing happened that happens every year around this time and is remarked upon each year as though it is a surprise. The hedgerows went. Not slowly, not gracefully — they went the way a good mood goes when someone mentions money. One night the fuchsia and the blackthorn were still carrying the last of themselves in the damp air, and the next morning they were simply skeletal, and the hills that had been private all summer were suddenly, brutally public, and you could see across to Slievenamon from a gate you'd stood at a hundred times without ever knowing it was possible.

Máire Egan stopped her car at that gate. She had driven the Back of Somewhere twice a day for eleven years, to the school in the town and back, and she had known in an abstract sense that Slievenamon was out there somewhere. Tipperary's problem, essentially. But there it was: unmistakable, solid, wearing its cloud like a man who hasn't taken his hat off indoors and doesn't intend to.

She sat with the engine running for longer than was strictly sensible. There was nothing to think about, particularly. It was a mountain. It was always there. The hedgerows came back every year. None of this was news. And yet the specific quality of the morning — the low amber light, the smell of rotting leaves and diesel and something sweetly agricultural that she had no word for but recognised as home the way you recognise a relative's handwriting — held her there with the mild authority of a place that knows it is loved.

Down the road, Pádraig Devereux — grandnephew of the original Devereux, no claim on the field but the name — was burning hedge cuttings in a barrel that was illegal for this purpose under three separate pieces of legislation. The smoke went up in a straight line, which meant the weather would hold. He noted this without ceremony. You learned to read the signs the same way you learned the shortcuts and the names of the fields and which neighbours could be trusted with a confidence and which absolutely could not: gradually, without instruction, until one day you simply knew, and the knowing sat in you like ballast.

Máire put the car in gear.

The Slievenamon stayed where it was, as mountains will, holding the border between here and there with the indifference of something that was around before the distinction mattered. The field held its water. The harrow continued its slow negotiations with the earth. The smoke from Pádraig's barrel drifted across the road in a way that was, technically, a traffic hazard, and was, practically, Tuesday.

Somewhere behind her, in the town, the school bell was about to ring. It always was. That was the thing about the Back of Somewhere — it was always just a moment outside of whatever was about to be required of you, which is perhaps why no one who knew it ever thought of it as nothing.

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