Why Ireland? For starters, the welcome, friendly eye-contact and how-are-yous,? the craic and good cheer of the pubs.

But this is not the place often imagined outside Ireland, a soft land of comical leprechauns and enchanting fairies. To the ancient Irish, these were malevolent beings, the old gods who lived in the burial mounds. Now, they may be seen as metaphorical guardians of the Earth, the precious treasure demanding their protection.

We can still visit the very mounds in which the ancient gods were thought to dwell. Ireland has been Inhabited for at least 33000 years, and what has been left behind stirs the imagination; human structures predating the pyramids by a thousand years: Poulnabrone Dolmen and Newgrange where 5200 years ago, skywatchers created a cosmic calendar and a passage tomb which admitted light into a burial chamber for precisely 17 minutes a year on the Winter Solstice. These were explorers of deep time. Employing eternal motifs, the magnificent entrance kerbstone seems to foreshadow Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Bru na Boinne contains 60% of the megalithic art in Europe. Small wonder that Newgrange and Knowth have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In Ireland, the spiritual world seems close to this one – as on Samhain night, the precursor to our Hallowe’en, when the veil between the otherworld and this world was at its thinnest; where more than 3000 holy wells, as the one at the Grianan of Aelich ring fort, and the mark of St Patrick as at the Rock of Cashel, still permeate the landscape.

Ireland is a land where time can lose its meaning, where the past permeates the present.

In a more physical sense, here the earth and rock of the fields seems to give rise organically to the dolmens, stone fences and beehive huts that rise out of them to fascinate us still.

Human spirit and tenacity run deep in Ireland. Witness the Aran Islands, where the people made their own soil from sand and seaweed raked from the sea and carried to the fields.

Ireland, a land of seafarers, from which St Brendan the Navigator sailed as far as North America on his seven year voyage – long before the Vikings, let alone Columbus.

Ireland, where scholarly monks, perched in stone huts in the isolated safety of Skellig Michael, helped save the key texts of Western civilization during the chaos after the fall of Rome.

Ireland, land of the bards and poets, whose spirit is still strong in the singing pubs, where even the young know the old songs.

Ireland, where the genius of a people erected stone buildings that have survived unscathed for 1200 years, while our modern roads last mere months or short years.

A land which survived famine (and still has fewer people than before the potato blight ravaged the population); invasion by Vikings and Anglo Saxons (the Romans never dared); division where the Troubles tore the Emerald Isle apart; which rose as the Celtic Tiger of technology, launching it to the third highest GDP per capita globally. This is a land of great strength and beauty. It might almost seem that, in spite of its many travails over time, having endured for millenia, Ireland must indeed be charmed.