Keith Brennan

I went to a mehal in Cavan six weeks ago, called by a couple with a hill they want made into a flat garden.

The car roars down grass-striped roads, ribboning round gable ends of houses, old pumps and the softnesses of fields.

And there, crammed into a 30 by 15 space, a small tribe of people dig.

I draw tools from the boot, it's hot and the sky holds rain.

We work, spades dipping in between the blades of shovels.

Joe sinks a six-foot spud bar where dark brown loam splits to metal yellow boulder clay, levers up an immense stone.

Spades are shoved in to help, and three of us shuckle the thing out of the socket suck of clay.

I'm here, too, to punish a thing out of the frame of me.

Burn in my shoulders, ragged flame in my haunches as I push domed barrows through claggy soil.

To stop her the voice of a pain I cannot say.

With pain my body can understand and speak.

The work breaks.

I ask.

What does a mehal mean to you?

Three answer.

It's the perfect introverted way to socialise.

to show respect to people and to have others pour love into your own place, to teach children community.

Joe says later, you came to be by yourself with a spade.

I watch a father working, fetching a pick into the earth at his far reach, son, hip high, held underneath the curl of him close, breaking up the broken clay with a spade.

Father to son, we are the groundbreakers, each one treasuring the other as they work.