Suffering a touch of midlife madness, the author found herself drawn to the dramatic west coast of Ireland and a way of writing she had always resisted – one with a strong connection to her past

In the spring of 2012 we took a long rent on a little house in the Burren, on the west coast of Ireland, with a view down to the limestone flats of the Flaggy Shore and across to the Aran Islands. This is a wild and beautiful part of the world. Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory all wrote about the islands; Heaney and, especially, Michael Longley also about the Flaggy Shore. It is an iconic landscape of the Irish national revival.

Perhaps it was the change of location, but it was one of those times in my life when I wasn’t entirely sure who I was any more. Every day I would walk out and let the wind blow these questions out of my mind, and also take in the wildness of the place. The green road is just that: a boreen, an unpaved track that crosses the uplands of the Burren from Ballynahown to the Caher Valley, with a changing view from the Cliffs of Moher in the south to the Twelve Bens and Maumturk mountains in the far north, across Galway Bay.

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