We did not see ourselves as a remarkable, far-flung or endangered people. Our way of life, our attitudes, our humour and engagement with our home place hardly deserved the attention of the National Geographic Society.
But the National Geographic Magazine for November 1978 included an article, "Where the River Shannon Flows". A map on page 657 showed the Shannon River: the longest river in Ireland or Britain, and the symbolic divide between the remainder of Ireland and the true west. Adam Woolfitt, the assignment photographer, included a two-page photo essay that highlighted my mother and father, Ann and Marx Leyden, on their family farm in Co Roscommon overlooking the Shannon. A caption quoted my father: "Don't stay too long in this country or it will capture you." Soon after the Shannon River article appeared, the postman began to arrive at our house on the mountain with letters from all over the world. Many of the letters were addressed simply to: "Matt and Ann Leyden, Overlooking Lough Allen, Ireland."
Inevitably, some wrote to say they shared the family name and wondered if they were related. But the owner of a cattle station in Australia, and a woman from Saskatchewan in Canada, wrote from opposite ends of the earth to say they felt their lives had a lot in common with Ann and Matt on their 23-acre small-holding in the north-west of Ireland. Another woman sent an oil painting of my mother and father at work in their romantic rural situation. And several of the correspondents came especially to Ireland to visit our home place, hoping to find a world as wholesome and gentle as the one portrayed in the photographs.
As the years passed, the National Geographic with the piece about my mother and father faded from memory.
But I was browsing one day in the Dandelion second-hand bookshop in Dublin when I spotted a stack of back issues of the magazine. I delved into the pile and found the copy I had in mind, Vol. 154, No. 5, close to the bottom of the stack. Seeing the photographs again provoked a complex mixture of emotions.
They presented a quaint and even corny tableau. And yet, Adam Woolfitt invented or contrived nothing. He showed how we lived then. And it struck me how our lives and Ireland as a country and a society had changed; how much was gone, was passing quickly or about to be lost forever.