It was dark when I reached the old cottage. The journey had been far from easy. I suppose a city-bred person such as myself would find most rural journeys difficult. I had certainly assumed too much. As the crow flies, I had been told that the cottage was only some twenty-one miles from the centre of Cork City. But in Ireland the miles are deceptive. I know there is a standard joke about "the Irish mile" but there is a grain of truth in it. For the Boggeragh Mountains, in whose shadows the cottage lay, are a brooding, windswept area where nothing grows but bleak heather, a dirty stubble which clings tenaciously to the grey granite thrusts of the hills, where the wind whistles and sings over a moonscape of rocks pricking upwards to the heavens. To walk a mile in such terrain, among the heights and terrible grandeur of the wild, rocky slopes and gorse you have to allow two hours. A mile on a well-kept road is not like a mile on a forgotten track amidst these sullen peaks.
What was I doing in such an inhospitable area in the first place? That is the question which you will undoubtedly ask.
Well, it was not through any desire on my part. But one must live and my livelihood depended on my job with RTE. I am a researcher with Telefis Eireann, the Irish state television. Initially it was the idea of some bright producer that we make a programme on Irish folk customs. So that was the initial impetus which found me searching among dusty tomes in an old occult bookstore, in a little alley off Sheares Street on the nameless island in the River Lee which constitutes the centre of the city of Cork. The area is often mentioned in the literature of Cork as the place where once the fashionable world came to see and be seen. That era of glory has departed and now small artisans' houses and shops crowd upon it claustrophobically.
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