LITMIR.BIZ

      The roads are very variable, some being grand, others very bad. Intercourse with the peasantry will be found interesting and amusing. Nothing can exceed their civility and courtesy; and for those who are not too particular it will be found an excellent plan to lunch in their cottages, excellent tea, home-made bread, butter and eggs being procurable for 1s. [5p] a head.

      The Cyclists’ Touring Club Irish Road Book, c. 1899

      In the autumn of 1985, more or less on the spur of the moment, we decided to go back to Ireland and travel through as much of it as we could in the space of three months or so, starting in the South. The North could wait. If things improved there, so much the better. If they got worse we would simply not go there. We were not going to travel in the guise of sociologists, journalists or contemporary historians. I was unlikely to write a book called Whither Ireland? or Ireland Now. We were not going there, we hoped, to be shot at. We remembered it as it had been some twenty years previously, when it had been idiosyncratic and fun. (Romantic Ireland was long since dead and gone, as Yeats wrote, ‘with O’Leary in the grave’ – that is, if it had ever existed.) We were going there, in short, to enjoy ourselves, an unfashionable aspiration in the 1980s.

      It was now mid-November. All Souls’ Day was already past. The dead season, as far as weather went, was in full sway all over the northern hemisphere and would last until Easter, and probably longer. We had no illusions about the dead season. Anywhere in the British Isles and in most parts of the Mediterranean it conjured up vistas of matchstick figures bent double by the wind, silhouetted against a colourless sea without a vessel in sight to break the monotony; sun lounges in hotels and guest houses filled with rolled-up carpet, those still open soldiering on with a skeleton staff, their proprietors in the Canaries, those left in charge in their absence never quite sober.

      But it will be better in Ireland, we said, putting our faith in the Gulf Stream, and in the Irish themselves with their humour, and trying to forget, while adding up their other virtues, their cooking, though even that was said to have improved.

      The reason we chose to begin our journey in this dead season was simply that at home in Dorset in the not-so-dead seasons we are engaged in extensive gardening operations without any sort of outside help. We have a large kitchen garden in which we grow all our own vegetables; large expanses of grass to

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