It contains ten civil parishes: Cruicetown, Emlagh, Enniskeen, Kilbeg, Kilmainham, Moybolgue, Moynalty, Newtown, Nobber, and Staholmog.

The predominant soil is a rich loam extremely productive, equally suited to tillage and to grazing, and so deep that even in the tops of the rising grounds it may be unsparingly trenched 4 feet for renovation.

The meadow and pasture land is also completely overrun with ragweed, thistles, and every other kind of weeds, which are suffered to vegetate in full luxuriance, and to run to seed.

To see those weeds in full flower or seed standing as high and nearly as thick as a crop of corn, over hundreds if not some thousands of acres of the finest grass land, was indeed a singular and deplorable spectacle.

• • • In short, Lower Kells contains some of the very worst farming which the English Assistant Commissioner recollects to have seen in any part of Great Britain, or the Continent; and one of the chief proprietors in that barony, who has also travelled much, expressed the same opinion.