I don't know how I missed the word "old" when I picked up an ordnance survey map of Manorhamilton in Betty Eager's newsagents last week. I couldn't figure out why Tony looked so cynical when I suggested that I'd get a better grasp of the layout of the town, by consulting it.
"Well that should tell you a lot about the topography of Manorhamilton in 1908," he replied with a smirk. It turned out that the map was actually a reprint of the Godfrey Edition and contains a hoard of fascinating information about the town. The photograph on the cover was eerily familiar and made me feel like I was stepping into one of my own dreams, where I had created the landscape, but where familiar landmarks were absent, or slightly skewed.
On closer inspection, I discovered that the photograph could have been taken by somebody standing directly outside my own front door, so the perspective in it is the same as the one I experience every day, when I walk up the town to shop, or take Leo to school. The gable end of Gurns Milestone Pub is clearly visible, though missing what is now its trademark sign. In the building directly opposite my house, there is a bay window jutting out on the upper level, overhanging an arched walkway where a man with a peaked cap is pushing a trolley.
People must have wondered what Tony and I were staring at, as we gazed at The Bank of Ireland opposite, trying to figure out where the window and walkway had gone. After a while, we could make out where the original architecture had been changed and that the front door of the bank is where the walkway would have been.
There is a step outside my house visible at the bottom righthand corner of the photograph. The step is now gone, as is the grid on the ground in front, which would have been where coal was delivered down to the basement. There was a time, therefore, when the basement would have formed part of the topography of the street; now you'd never know there were three rooms under your feet as you walk by.
Remarkably little else seems to have changed on the outside of the town, but when you read the historical notes inside the map you realise that the shifts of time, politics, and economics wreaked their vengeance just the same, if not in its architecture, then certainly in terms of its people.
You never really get a straight answer when you ask people what is the exact population of Manorhamilton, and estimates vary from 900 to 1,000 inhabitants. In May 1849, during the Famine years there were 880 people in the workhouse, 400 sheltered in rented houses and a further 1,000 receiving outdoor relief. This would put the population then at 2,280. Nor did the famine reduce the population as drastically as it did in other areas. The real population decline can be attributed to two key factors: the closing of the railway and partition.
Proximity to the Border affected the town's economy, and its location between the bigger market centres at Sligo and Enniskillen did not serve it well. Despite all this, in the 1940s the town could boast two cinemas and three dancehalls - though a cursory walk around gives no indicators of where these might have been. There are no cinemas here now, and precious little evidence of dancing.
There was good news, however, to be found in the Manorhamilton notes in the Leitrim Observer last week, under a section entitled "Marriage Regulations". Beneath the usual rules regarding pre-marriage courses, and no weddings on Sundays or holy days, lay some commentary which is reason for celebration.
In 1999, St Clare's Church had 22 baptisms and 19 deaths. This small statistical fact means that for the first time since 1925, Manorhamilton recorded an increase in its population, which is great news for a place regarded as western Europe's most sparsely populated area.
But the reversal of historical fortune cannot be left to the existing population alone. Infrastructures need to be created which will attract and retain those who can start families and provide a reason to stay for children born in this town. Reproduction alone will not do it. It's good to hear the Government is attempting to send the Celtic Tiger for a little prowl in the north-west, under the National Development Plan. But it should hang its head in shame at the evidence of past neglect and the effect of the centralisation of services.
Manorhamilton Castle was destroyed in 1652, and the fact that Our Lady's Hospital, built in 1951, was the largest building erected in the town since then, tells its own tale. Maps can tell you a lot about the past, but even more about the future.
