The Dogs in the Great Glen by Benedict Kiely (they didn't bark)

Benedict Kiely is as much a teller, as a writer, of short stories and so the particular rambling flavour comes out when you read having his voice in your head. Luckily there is much broadcast archive material. His narration of the Hands programme on the Mullhollands of Lisnaskea, Co.Fermanagh, Farmers and Stonecutters is a good example.
Hands

The story The Dogs in the Great Glen from A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963) is a fine controlled meander. The New Yorker Magazine published it in 1960:
the dogs in the great glen

The narrator that may or may not be a class of a psychopomp sets out with an Irish American professor to discover the mountain valley in Kerry that his grandfather emigrated from. He has only the name, the bare name of the glen, the Glen of Kanareen. That shouldn’t be too hard, there are maps, ordnance survey maps. Not marked. Often the local name may be different from the Anglicised official name but the guide has a feeling that he heard the name in a pub in Kenmare once. More seeming solid is the possibility of knowledge to be gained from a record of a relative who had been a monk in the Cistercian monastery of Mount Melleray in Co.Waterford. South then in the rattly Prefect only to arrive too late at the guesthouse. They decide to go West to Gort across the country to Gort in the County of Galway where a relation had been a cooper. No luck there either. Since aluminium firkins coopering is a dwindling trade. One good omen though – on the lake in Coole demense were nine and fifty swans. North to Galway town for the craic - a night’s hard drinking that was like a fit of jovial hysteria.

Back in the Prefect and south to Kenmare but no one in the savant stacked pub could tell them of Kanareen or its Glen. The Kerryman will never be defeated by base knowledge when a conjecture will suffice. .It could of course’, he said, ‘be east over the mountain’.

Eventually though they find a solid anecdote. A rural postmaster tells them of a local woman who married a man from Karaneen. When they left to go to his place after the marriage they set off up that road.

The rattle of our pathetic little car affronted the vast stillness. We were free to moralize on the extent of all space in relation to the trivial area that limited our ordinary daily lives.

They are on the right track , they think, but for the last part of the climb up through the gap in the mountains they leave the car and walk on the grass verge of the loose gravelled boreen. A pisgah sight:

Small rich fields were ripe in the sun. This was a glen of plenty, a gold field in the middle of a desert, a happy laughing mockery of the arid surrounding moors and mountains. Five hundred yards away a dozen people were working at the hay. They didn’t look up or give any sign that they had seen two strangers cross the high threshold of their kingdom but, as we went down, stepping like grenadier guards, the black and white sheepdogs detached themselves from the haymaking and move silently across to intercept our path. Five of them I counted. My step faltered.

further down:

The silent dogs came closer. The unheeding people went on with their work.

When you are on a pilgrimage a vision accompanies you. Here it is the heart broken dreams of his grandfather’s native place that come like a veil between the locals and the two travellers. Sheepdogs that don’t bark, that’s uncanny.

When he meets his grandfather’s brother at the old house the spell is broken:

Through sunlight and shadow the happy haymakers came running down towards us and barking, playing, frisking over each other, the seven black-and-white dogs, messengers of good news, ran to meet. The great Glen, all happy echoes, was opening out and singing to welcome its true son.