The Liffey Valley

Abumpy avenue seemed to lead through parkland - a favourite Irish technique in road repair is to fill the pot-holes with pebbles and leave the traffic to level them. Then there was the stone-flagged hall of a Georgian house and a clamour of voices. Someone suggested a bath and sleep for me, and I gladly acquiesced.

A long, narrow bedroom housed a bath and lavatory, and ancient family photographs by Eliot and Fry - the figures posed as conversation pieces - shared the walls with John Leach's sporting prints. There must have been a vogue once for the latter as bathroom décor, for I remember them at my grandparents' house. The water was surprisingly hot.

My room was large and dim; it was uncarpeted and not very quiet, since it backed on to the plumbing of the bathroom. But I slept at first from sheer exhaustion.

The household consisted of five ageing sisters - perhaps only Ireland could produce such a ménage. Four were unmarried; the remaining one, a widow, had her younger son with her. The father used to live in great style, keeping up a huge country place and entertaining lavishly; but he was ashamed to admit, if approached by a suitor, that he could provide each daughter with only a hundred pounds a year. He would accordingly dismiss with abuse any eligible swain, and so tyrannized over the girls that they trembled even to meet him on the staircase, meanwhile continuing to live far beyond his means. Only the youngest daughter married, and that was after his death when the place had to be sold. Still holding to a traditional way of life which they had not the money to support, they pooled their resources and courageously maintained a semblance of it by running a guest-house.

The sisters all talked loudly and at once, no one listening, each of them intent on expressing her own reactions. Except the eldest, who was a semi-invalid, all worked hard in house and garden but without any organization and so with some waste of effort. There was much bickering, but the animal unity of the clan remained unbroken beneath super-ficial scratches.

Their setting was almost Spanish in its mingled nobility and shabbiness. The plasterwork of the ceilings, the ironwork of the fireplaces were fine, and the flowers grown in the garden were set in Crown Derby vases. The wallpaper in the drawing-room, an exquisite pale-gold pattern on white, was more than a hundred years old - they all mounted ladders when they first moved into the house and cleaned the whole of it with bread. But the huge rooms had little heating; windows and doors did not fit, letting in all too easily the damp and chill of the Irish climate. What matter if carpets were seldom swept, for the food was good, much of it produced in the garden and farmstead.

A park and woodland at the back of the house sloped to the Liffey, and in the evening I went there with J. to collect firewood. There was no turf to burn in the neighbouring countryside, and other fuels were expensive. Under towering trees the white of garlic in flower gave the illusion of a snowfall, and its sickly smell made me feel faint. Beside a ramshackle fishing hut flowed the river; dark, suddenly rippled, 'she ninnygoes, nannygoes, nancing by'. Upstream was a mill by a weir, salmon rising in the quieter reaches. Thunder was in the air but no rain. J. made a bundle of the fallen branches we had found and carried it home in an old tweed coat.

I spent the next morning at work in the studio, a spacious room with three long windows, almost unfurnished and completely unheated. In a household of this kind there are always dogs to be exercised, and later on I took them for a walk. (A breeder in the neighbourhood was said to have 'nests of dogs'.) Clouds had been heavy all day, and now rain was beginning to fall, pitting the Liffey's tranquil glide. Belated primroses lurked in the sopping grass, and above them thorn blossom burdened the hedges.

There was white asphodel in the luxuriant herbaceous border of the south garden and red broom like raw flesh. How do subtropical plants survive in this climate, much colder than anything in the south of England? Beneath one of the enormous yews of the walled garden grew a plant of drooping form, like those of the lily-of-the-valley tribe, but its waxen flowers were composite. Untrimmed thorn hedges, also grown to immense size like the yews, supported a tangle of ivy and wild clematis that scrambled to their highest twigs and cascaded down again almost hiding the walls, which were castellated in places and topped with rank valerian. There I found the Davidia, a Chinese tree taller than the yews and covered with flowers like handkerchiefs or small flags attached to it by one corner. It reminded me of the fig tree of St Salomoné near Paphos, where devotees tear a strip from their clothing to hang upon the branches above the sacred well. I have heard that this custom, still usual in the Middle East, lingers also in Ireland, and the association of tree, well and votive tatters may be found here, too, though the fig or olive is replaced by an isolated thorn.

There are skies in Ireland as nowhere else; clouds that seem full of ink, the clear spaces beyond them appallingly metallic; masses of vapour stretching themselves for miles, half detached from the cloud's main body; or an impermeable weight, heavy as a castle with an edge of 'terrible crystal'. There is always an alienating contrast, as the misty and the dazzling, the massive and the slight, the dense and the transparent. This character of the heavens is due, I suppose, to an intense clearness, coming from the comparative absence of industrial pollution, and to the great humidity, so that the atmosphere, already free of the worst grimes, is yet continually washed in a medium that veils any strident glare. There is only one thing better than a fine day in England and that is a fine day in Ireland - and not only because of its rarity. Perhaps a fine day in Kerry is best of all, when the air is like a diamond yet the dews are never far away.

A pair of hawks, in size between kestrel and buzzard, with the buzzard's spiral flight - what were they? Enviable birds, lifted above the enclosing earth. The valley of the Liffey is somewhat oppressive here, rather like a vaster and greener Weybridge. Neither district is true country but land parcelled out as residential plots, one garden (or in this case, one park) bordering the next with no space between and, as far as the eye can see, no space beyond - an all-too-'settled ground'. It even reminds one of Huis Clos:

Garcin: Et au bout de ce couloir?

Le Garçon: Il y a d'autres chambres et d'autres couloirs.

But this, after all, is only the Ireland of the Pale; beyond it, somewhere, is wildness.

Many families lead the traditional life of gentry in spite of straitened means. Levelling influences have taken longer to become apparent, the cost of living is somewhat lower, servants slightly easier to come by and (often the deciding factor) standards of comfort less exacting. Big houses are lived in here long after they have ceased to be, by English standards, in habitable repair and lacking, as they often do, the most elementary conveniences. 'The county' doesn't mind shabbiness or even squalor so long as your politics, your religion and your accent are 'right'.

J. told us a story of how he was once trying to buy a greyhound from a woman who bred them in one of these dilapidated country places. When he entered the vast central hall, where swarms of bats were flittering among the rafters and rain dripping in through numerous leaks, he found his hostess lying in a drunken stupor beside the embers of a turf fire. When at last he was able to rouse her, she led him unsteadily to the back premises where the hounds were kept. The litter from which he was to select the puppy had not yet been born, but if the promised greyhound was not evident, the greyhounds' larder certainly was, for hunks of horseflesh and half-flayed bullocks' heads hung from the surrounding trees. J. was not sorry to take leave of this macabre establishment, where, needless to say, his deal was never satisfactorily completed.

In another house I heard of, rats were treated as domestic pets. They were allowed to spring upon a dresser, breaking its store of priceless china, and to chew the hem of the eighteenth-century curtains, embroidered in scarlet and white beads, which hung in the many tall windows. These were examples of the big house in decline, approached, though seldom equalled by, many another domain in Ireland, which, once the centre of an almost self-supporting community and the focus of a variety of skills, has been left all but deserted. Heavy drinking, though, is less characteristic of the Anglo-Irish than of some of their neighbours, and indeed they often make their first economies on alcohol.

Though politically almost unrepresented and economically all but insolvent, the Protestant Ascendency is still, strange to say, in the ascendant socially. The BBC is popular, and Radio Éireann is seldom switched on except for racing results; to speak with a brogue is to be frowned upon, and one goes to church on Ascension Day to offset the mass-going Catholics....