Cor Locha · Co. Cavan
The round hill of the lake. Bog, border, and not much else - in the best sense.
Corlough is a small townland settlement in the north-west corner of Cavan, a few kilometres from both the Leitrim border to the west and the Fermanagh border to the north. The population has been under three hundred for as long as reliable records have existed, and considerably lower than that for most of the last century and a half. It is not a place that grew; it is a place that contracted and then stabilised at a level the land could actually support.
The Irish name, Cor Locha - the round hill of the lake - is accurate. The landscape is a mix of raised bog, poorly-drained farmland, and the small dark lakes that sit in the depressions between drumlin ridges. The Cuilcagh mountain region rises to the north, marking the Fermanagh border. On a clear day the plateau is visible from the high ground around the village. It is not close, but it is present.
This was always poor-land country. The soils in the west Cavan corridor are thin above the rock, wet for most of the year, and never easily tilled. The Famine years of the 1840s cleared the already sparse population further, and emigration continued through the following century in a way that was less dramatic than a disaster and more like a slow bleed. The people who left went to England, to New York, to Boston. The lanes that lead out of Corlough in several directions were the first step of many long journeys that most people never reversed.
