looking at ordinary artefacts, I’m not talking about grand stuff that you’d see in castles, but dishes, knives, forks, jugs, plates, things like that that have survived from as far back as the sixteenth century, how little of that sort of thing exists in Ireland – and the reason. Just when people would be getting a little prosperity, every fifty years or so there’d be some new devastation and they’d be pounded back into the slime.’
