McGahern died in Mater Hospital in Dublin, and it was there that his journey back to Leitrim began early yesterday. Friends and family, amongst them the broadcaster Mike Murphy, Labour TD Joan Burton, actor Mick Lally and journalist Eddie Holt gathered in a small room in the basement of the private hospital.

With the red eyes of morning and mourning, anecdotes were thrown around like coins in a well of remembrance. The hearse was followed out of the underground car park by a black car with tinted windows. It carried McGahern's wife, Madeline Green, and the writer's siblings.

Beyond the N4 motorway, the brown and beige fields of Leitrim, interrupted by gorse, pointed the way to where McGahern spent most of his life walking the countryside, taking pleasure in what it offered him.

In Roosky, the swept reeds alongside Kilglass Lough and the marshy fields preceded the winding road from Dromod to Mohill, where people gathered at the crossroads on Lower Main Street. By Early's and Carroll's Public House, a butcher in a striped red apron chatted to elderly men in caps. As the hearse passed by, they quietened. A book of condolence was set up outside Carroll's, the peace just briefly disturbed by an excitable dog jumping amongst waiting children.

Beyond Mohill, past lanes enclosed in tunnels of joining branches was Garvagh, where rain threatened and clouds rubbed the hilltops that looked down over the lake. In Fenagh, crowds lined the paths beside Quinn's pub, leaning against the moss-topped stone walls which led to Ballinamore, and then up and down hills to Aughawillan.

Most people parked at the national school, and walked down the lane to St Patrick's Church as dark clouds shifted over Garadice Lough. The old, white, pebble dashed church was already full three-quarters of an hour before mass. As the Minister for the Arts, John O'Donoghue, signed the book of condolence, McGahern's admirers and friends from the arts community arrived.

They included Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and Eugene McCabe. Hundreds of local people lined the walls of the church, eyeing the novelty of crowds of press photographers and TV cameramen.

A loudspeaker was set up outside the church, so the many who could not fit could hear the mass, which was said by McGahern's friend Father Liam Kelly. Kelly, also a cousin of the author, said it was appropriate that the funeral took place in St Patrick's as it was here where McGahern first came to church as a child, where he learned to say mass and where he experienced "his first brush with discipline" when he was denounced from the altar for rattling his beads too loudly during prayer.

Fr Kelly told those gathered that McGahern was very aware of his impending death, and spoke openly about his funeral plans in the weeks leading up to it. "He wanted no fuss, no frills, just a simple mass". And that is what he received. As the coffin was brought from the gates of the church through the crowd, no music played. No music played either when his sisters Rosaline, Margaret, Monica and Dympna brought up the gifts of the offertory, or at anytime during the service.

In a touching sermon, Fr Kelly praised McGahern's writing. "His work, like all good art, is essentially spiritual". He said McGahern tapped into "the minutiae of life, the things that others see, yet never notice . . .

only a person with a great gift and deep spirituality could produce such fair and lyrical prose about ordinary days in ordinary places".

Fr Kelly, originally from Leitrim but now based in Cavan, reminded mourners of the lane just outside the church door, quoting from McGahern's Memoir: "I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school."

Fr Kelly spoke about the last few weeks he had spent with McGahern, a man he counted as a dear friend for more than 30 years. "He loved life, but did not fear death. He liked to quote Achilles: 'speak not soothingly to me of death'. He was never one to run away from the realities of life and death . . . to him, one was as natural as the other. He was completely at peace in his last few days", Kelly said, as a couple of drops of rain fell outside and then stopped. "He never complained about dying. A great writer and a good man has died and we are all the poorer for it."

As the coffin was carried just the few yards outside the church walls, the crowds gathered around the plot where McGahern was to be buried alongside his beloved mother. The grave was blessed. And heavy sleet fell as the dirt hit the coffin's wood to the sound of a rosary being said by those who loved him. As the crowd were invited by family to the Landmark Hotel (one of McGahern's last wishes), the priest repeated the writer's final reminder: that there was to be no sympathy offered.