Bernard O'Donoghue

I'm very grateful and honoured to be here again.

The only reservation might be that I'm a declared Cork football supporter after the annual humiliation this year.

So I come from near Mill Street, and the first point I want to read is called The Iron Age Boat at Cometruish, which is a town land just outside Mill Street under Clara Mountain.

And this log boat was dug up there about 30 years ago, and with a great kind of curiosity and sort of celebrity in the locality, people went to see it as a kind of, as a sign of parable, really.

The Iron Age boat had come at Reus.

If you doubt, you can put your fingers in the holes where the oar pegs went.

If you doubt still, look past its deep mooring to the mountains that enfold the Corrie's waterfall of lace, through which, they say, you can see out but not in.

If you doubt that, hear the falcon crying down from Guinevere's bog cut from the mountain top.

And if you doubt, after all these witnesses, no boat dredged back from the dead could make you believe.

So after Mill Street, I lived in the south of England mostly after Manchester in the interim.

But of course, like all of us, all the Irish in England and the Irish on that island, we're constantly coming back.

So the ferries from Wales to the south of Ireland are a major presence in our lives.

This is called Westering Home, which isn't thinking about Harry Lauder and the Western Isles, but us coming this way.

Westering Home.

Though you'd be pressed to say exactly where it first sets in, driving west through Wales, things start to feel like Ireland.

It can't be the chapels with their clear grey windows or the buzzards menacing the scooped valleys.

In April, have the blurred blackthorn hedges something to do with it?

Or possibly the motorway which seems to lose its nerve mile by mile?

The houses up to a point with their mason gables, each upper window a raised eyebrow.

More though than all of this is the architecture of the spirit.