ABSTRACT
Although London was his permanent home for most of his life, Ireland was drawn to country sites of historic significance, specifically those places in which the presence of the past could be keenly felt, where there might be ‘a sense of something vaguely sinister, which would do harm if it could ... of something muffled up and recalcitrant; of something which rises upon its elbow when no one is present and looks down the converging paths’ (Forster, 1972: 355). These were usually burial sites and other spots of previous intensive activity such as chalk-pits and flint-mines, places which had ‘morphic resonances’ (as discussed in Sheldrake, 1993 and 1994), and which for Ireland precipitated experiences that were encapsulated in his compositions. Identification with a place and its pagan past seems to have been a real driving force behind Ireland’s music.
