The old National School at Mullanmore, a few miles out of Glenties, is still there. Wild strawberries and thistles cluster on the roadside bank and the path up to its door is crowded now with buttercups, butterflies and yellow irises but, if you close your eyes, you may hear the children saying their tables, packed together - all 60 of them - into the one classroom. Among them you may notice one small boy different from the rest: Patrick MacGill, later to be known as the navvy poet. The annual summer school in MacGill's honour kicks off this weekend in Glenties.
Patrick was the child of William MacGill and Bridget Boyle MacGill who, in 1889, travelled out along the road to Upper Maas in order to give birth to her first child in her mother's home as was the custom then. The small house is still there, gable end to the wind with, across the road from it, a view of the Gweebara estuary and the mountains beyond.
But it is up the big glen that you'll find the real MacGill country. Take the Ballybofey road out of Glenties, past the old cemetery with its two white-washed scallans - the simple shelters built to cover graves belonging to those a cut above the rest. Pass the old school on the opposite side, turn left up a steep laneway and then take another left that will bring you along a short track leading to the house in which Patrick MacGill and his 10 brothers and sisters were reared. The house, with its three rooms and kitchen, is the traditional homestead with a byre out the back and a meadow in front. This was where Bridget raised her family, feeding them with milk, eggs and vegetables all produced on the MacGill holding.
The glen is a calm, comforting place, its hills enclosing Patrick's small world bordered by home and school. It was these hills and meadows that nourished the young poet and grounded him for life in Glenties even though he left it in his youth.
The school census of 1901 tells the story: William and Bridget MacGill are listed along with seven of their children - the first three young scholars able to both read and write (William is listed as knowing Irish). A school photo shows the 10-year-old Patrick standing tall above his comrades and looking steadfastly at the camera - a boy with, already, a sense of his own worth. Two years later, his education was interrupted when he was sent off to the hiring fair at Strabane. From there he joined a potato-picking squad bound for Scotland.
Glenties Museum has a fine collection of letters and photographs of MacGill and his wife Margaret - another Irish writer - as well as, downstairs, a reconstruction of the infamous bathroom installed by the impoverished people of Glenties for their much-admired parish priest.
The story, told in MacGill's first and largely autobiographical novel, Children of the Dead End, attracted the ire of the Catholic Church and not surprisingly since the parochial house is clearly identified and can still be seen today - a fine, large house standing behind the trees close to the new primary school.
Glenties gave MacGill his confident heart and the Carnegie Library in Glasgow his book learning although the librarians were afraid, at first, to let him borrow their books for fear he might mark them with his work-stained hands. He went on, of course, to publish 20 novels of his own.
Patrick MacGill died in 1963 and is buried in Fall River, Massachusetts.
This year's MacGill Summer School starts tomorrow. Details from 075 51103