The author on writing her novel a cottage in County Clare, and letting her scattered characters take on lives of their own

In 2012 we took a long rent on a cottage in County Clare with a sea view that went all the way to the Aran Islands. It was a fancy version of the cottage my father grew up in, 30 miles south along the coast and, when I told him we were going there, my father, whose voice was damaged in his great old age, started to whisper a poem of his youth: “Oh little Corca Baiscinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair, / Oh little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!”

Truth be told I was running away to County Clare, in the turbulence and ardency of middle age. I walked out like a madwoman every evening up the grass-covered, green road that began near the house and which went many miles over the uplands of the Burren. During the day I wrote about an Irish aid worker in Africa. I had been writing this for some time. The little house belonged to a builder who was working in Nigeria because of the collapse of the Irish housing market, and I thought this a nice synchronicity. Every time the aid worker sent a letter home he thought about the stone walls of the west of Ireland with the fuschia and orange montbretia (as we call crocosmia) growing alongside it.

Related: The Green Road by Anne Enright review – a family’s worth of stories