The screenwriter from the border
Shane Connaughton
Connaughton grew up in Redhills and set his first book, A Border Station (1989), in the parish — stories about a Garda sergeant's family on the Cavan-Monaghan line in the 1950s. It was shortlisted for a major prize and sold well. His second book, The Run of the Country (1991), was the same territory. Then Hollywood arrived. The Playboys (1992) — script by Connaughton, set in a 1957 Cavan village, filmed in Redhills itself — starred Albert Finney, Robin Wright, and Aidan Quinn. Connaughton had already been nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing My Left Foot. The village was, briefly, a film location of international standing. The fields and the church and the crossroads are still exactly what they were.
The line that went to Clones
The Great Northern Railway
The Cavan and Clones line of the Great Northern Railway opened in 1873, and Redhills got a station — a single-platform halt on Killyfana Road, eight and a half miles northeast of Cavan town. For eighty years the line connected this border country to Clones in Monaghan, and beyond that to the wider GNR network. Passenger services ended in October 1957. The station closed completely in June 1958. The track was lifted and the route absorbed back into the landscape. What looks like a particularly straight lane or a field with unexpectedly firm ground is often the old trackbed. The station building survived for decades and has been a landmark on the road ever since.
Three counties, one watershed
The Finn River and the border
The Finn River flows a short distance north of Redhills and drains into Upper Lough Erne in Fermanagh. This is a landscape where the county boundaries and the old Ulster border cut across the watershed in awkward angles. Farmers here have always had land in two counties, relatives in three, and a complicated relationship with whichever government was notionally in charge. The border that became the political frontier in 1921 ran through fields that families had farmed for generations. Connaughton's fiction — A Border Station especially — is as good an account of what that actually felt like, day to day, as anything in print.
Ice-age hills with autumn colour
The drumlins
The drumlin belt of north Cavan and south Monaghan is one of the densest concentrations of drumlins in Ireland — small oval hills, thirty to forty metres high, packed so tightly that the valleys between them fill with water or bog. They were formed at the edge of the last ice sheet and run roughly northwest to southeast, which is the direction the ice was moving. The bracken on the slopes turns red-brown in October. The name An Cnoc Rua — the red hill — is a straightforward description of what the place looks like for about six weeks of the year.