Then he moved a metal barricade away from the graveyard entrance — “It’s just a makeshift thing,” he said — and let me in. The bright green grass was so soft under my feet that I said so, and the man said it probably should have been farmland all those years ago. The graveyard has only a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine, making poverty a scourge in rural Ireland. So much covered-over misery, such an alluringly pastoral setting: This felt like Friel to me.

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Persons: “, ”, —, Friel Locations: Ireland, Inishkeel, Narin, Portnoo