Then someone, no one seemed to know who (it was probably the undertaker), had decided that the remains, instead of being interred in the family grave nearby, were to be brought to Kilbride, where Father Conroy had been parish priest. It all seemed so settled that no one thought of questioning the arrangement.

The funeral left Father O’Hara’s house, slowly at first. Farm laborers and foresters, cycling home from work, dismounted and touched their caps or walked a few steps with it. Once out of the valley and on the main road, the sleek, bulging black hearse picked up speed rapidly; it was wanted for another funeral later in the evening. The long line of cars sped after it, up the winding road into the hills.

The best of the diocese lay behind, the uplands of Rosnagree, good farming country with comfortable old farmhouses and big red barns, the wide parklands of the plain beyond watered by the river and its streams. Down there, among copses of oak and beech, was the cathedral town of Castlemore, where all the affairs of the diocese had, if anywhere, their meaning.

The Kilbride country was drawing near, bare hills peopled with sheep and boulders. Small fields had been ironed out of the fern and yellow furze, which thronged back again against the loose stone walls. From the doorway of a thatched cottage, an old woman made the sign of the cross as they passed. The houses were small, the yards dungy. The hay was ricked in the open, pinned down by central stakes, and eroded by the grazing of the cattle into the shape of toadstools.

Conroy had been priest here for seven years. He had sat in these stuffy parlors, under the faded photographs of priests and bearded grandfathers. He had fitted himself into these interrelated, clotted lives, into the smell of damp and turf smoke.

“They’re a difficult people, right enough,” said Father O’Hara suddenly. “Inbred, you know. But Conroy could handle them. He always said Kilbride was a fine, airy parish.”

Or the dunghill of the diocese – he had said that too!

Beyond the crossroads which was Kilbride – the three houses and the pub – the road led on through a few backward hamlets and petered out on the bare slopes of the mountains. It was a place halfway to nowhere.