Droim ar Snámh · Co. Leitrim
A loop of the Shannon that was once Leitrim's busiest trading town, where Anthony Trollope found his first novel and an Iron Age army dug a frontier across the river.
Drumsna is small now - 268 people at the last count - but it was not always a backwater. In the nineteenth century this was the main trading town in Leitrim, with its own jail and courthouse, a harbour full of boats, and the stopping point for the horse-drawn carriages on the road west. The 1817 harbour was the engine of it. Then in 1850 the Jamestown Canal opened a straighter line of navigation north to Carrick, the trade moved with it, and Drumsna began the long slide into quiet.
The river is still the whole point. The Shannon makes a long lazy loop here, wide and slow, good for coarse fishing - bream, roach, rudd, tench, pike, perch - and the harbour jetty still takes the cruisers in summer. Lough Aduff and Headford Lake are minutes away for the anglers. There is a Roman Catholic church from 1845 that is said to hold one of the largest church bells in the country, a handful of houses, and the village pub. That is the village, plainly.
The reason most people who have heard of Drumsna have heard of it is Anthony Trollope. He arrived in 1843 to sort out a postmaster's accounts, hated the job, doubted he could write, and then walked out one evening to the ruin of a tumbledown house above the village. He decided on the spot it would be the setting of a novel. The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) was the result - a dark story of a Leitrim family's ruin, set in and around this exact place. It sold almost nothing, but he had become a writer, and he never stopped after that.
There is older history in the ground here too. The Doon of Drumsna, an enormous Iron Age earthwork, cuts off a hundred hectares of land in a bend of the Shannon just across the river in Roscommon. And Drumsna gave the world the man who arguably brought Methodism to America, Robert Strawbridge, born in the townland of Gortconnellan around 1732. For a village this size, that is a long way to have reached.