A quirk of the 1921 line
The Protestant village in the South
Drum is one of the very few Protestant-majority settlements in the Republic of Ireland, and the most cited example. It grew as an Ulster Scots Presbyterian community from the seventeenth century, settled from the planted lands to the north. When partition came in 1921 the village ended up a few miles inside the Free State rather than in Northern Ireland, against the expectation of much of its population. Many border Protestant communities thinned out or moved north afterwards; Drum largely held together and kept its identity. It is the kind of place that complicates the tidy two-tribes map of the island.
Where the community gathers
Four churches, no pub
For a village of about two hundred people, Drum has an unusual concentration of places of worship: a Presbyterian church, a Church of Ireland church, a Free Presbyterian church, and a Gospel Hall. There is no Catholic church in the village - the nearest, St Joseph's at Corrinshigo, is under two miles west. The Presbyterian congregation is described as one of the oldest on the island, and the current barn-roofed church at Cortober, with its galleried interior on Doric columns and box pews, dates from around 1825, replacing an older meeting house near the school. The shop and the pub are both gone, so the churches and the Protestant Hall are where the village still gathers.
Marching, twenty-odd times a year
The lodges and the accordion band
The Protestant Hall in Drum is home to two Orange Lodges, a branch of the Royal Black Preceptory, and the Drum Accordion Band. The band plays at somewhere between twenty and twenty-five parades a year, and every Twelfth of July it crosses the border to march at the big Orange demonstrations in Enniskillen and Armagh, before the lodges hold their own picnic and parade in the village. It is a rare thing to see a living Orange marching tradition in the Republic, carried on quietly by a tiny community. The minister Heather Humphreys grew up in this world.
An Droim, the ridge
The lakes and the drumlins
Drum takes its name from the drumlins - the low, egg-shaped hills left by the last ice sheet that give all of west Monaghan and Cavan their humpbacked, lake-pocked look. The village sits among three of those lakes: Drum Lough to the north, Quarry Lough to the west, and Long Lough to the south. It is quiet, working farmland, the kind of border drumlin country that the painter and the angler both like and the tour bus never finds.