The grand Irish tour

by Peter Somerville-Large

Peter Somerville-Large's intention was perfectly he would wander slowly around Ireland during the course of a year. In a sense, that is what he did, but his Grand Irish Tour is something far more ambitious and far more satisfying. Unlike any other twentieth-century writer, he has evoked the landscapes and townscapes, the people, and the different memories which make up Ireland. He contrasts the present with what he knew as a boy, but he also draws on the diaries and records of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers. Here is Thomas Carlyle in 1849, using stream of consciousness as if Joyce were already writing. Here is the bizarre Mr Atkinson, forever collecting subscriptions to his books. Here are Somerville and Ross in their governess cart; Mrs Delaney ensconced at Mount Panther; Thackeray fending off the appalling guides at the Giant-s Causeway; the intrepid Asenath Nicholson, hoping to combat Catholicism with true American fervour; the Chevalier de Latocnaye, exchanging the horrors of the French Revolution for the dubious comforts of Irish inns. And, further back in history, there is the extraordinary Don Francisco de Cuellar, a survivor of the Spanish Armada who wrote an account of his hair-raising adventures.Peter Somerville-Large weaves together these opinionated, vivid, wonderfully sharp eyewitness impressions as he takes us through Killarney and Cork, Limerick and Galway, Killala and Sligo, Drogheda and Wexford, Ballyshannon and Bushmills, Downpatrick and Antrim. He himself has an ideally acute eye and ear for the Irish peculiarity or charm or disagreeableness. The Grand Irish Tour is funny, touching, beautifully descriptive, eccentric. It will become a classic.

Genres: Ireland, Travel

329 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1982

About the author

Peter Somerville-Large was born in Dublin in 1928 and was educated at St Columba’s College and Trinity College Dublin. His first job in Afghanistan was followed by a spell of travel in Asia during the early 1950s. Destinations for his travel books include Ireland, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, and Tibet. He has also written four thrillers, and a number of short stories, including two prize winners. He lives in Co. Carlow with his wife Gillian.