Nuala O'Faolain on Ireland:

"Ireland distracted me. I was shocked by its plainness. A road sign would give the name of the next village, which would turn out, when I'd managed to translate the Irish words into their meanings, to be a lovely name. The Mill of the Stranger. The Fort of the Dun Cow. THe Bright Swans. And then would come the dull reality--a wide street of two-storey houses of gray plaster and gray brick and a single big gray church and a couple of plain pubs. All the history of the place was in the language. There was hardly a building or artifact from centuries of social life to be seen on the ground. Ruins of abbeys and castles. Then nothing. Then things from my grandparents' time [ed.--Compare Yeats' "grey eighteenth century houses"].

"I kept going back in my mind to my days on The English Traveller, when I used to marvel at the villages of England. Villages tucked away at the end of hedge-lines roads into valleys, with low-windowed cottages and mossy stone paths between cottage gardens, and streams running down to the ponds in the village greens. Low stone villages up on moors. Villages with little ancient churches, obdurate as barnacles. The paths to villagesthat led through beech-woods hiddne in the ravines between sloping meadows. And the plain Queen Anne rectories, and the roofs of the squires' fine places thorugh the trees, and the schools of golden stone that the squire built. The rose-covered dispensaries, the gift of Lady so-and-so . . . I used to read the names on the war memorials. I used to imagine it--the landlord and the laborer carried in their coffins through the same lych-gate. And the gleaming, mellow pubs--The Plumed Feathers, The Coach and Horses. I couldn't get over being in a country where all the different classes lived in villages together. Those villages are jewels, I said to myself now. But Ireland was robbed. Ireland was stripped and left bare."