ABSTRACT
While Ireland’s pagan places were the downlands of southern England and the ancient monuments of the Channel Islands, these territories had another, different aspect, without the expanse, the wilderness and the momentous events. Where the pagan, ‘upland’ locations all involved a climb up hidden paths to hills, promontories and barrows, the same regions also had a ‘lowland’, and much more contained, benign side. There was a Sussex that, like Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester, might be ‘flower-lulled in sleepy grass’ (Brooke, 1970: 68), inviting Edward Thomas’ ‘sublime vacancy / of sky and meadow and forest and of my own heart’ (Thomas, 1975: 131). And there was a pre-war Jersey of heady summers days and seaside holidays. Ireland’s country was a place of romantic idyll, a personal Arcadia. The pieces that belong to this topic are almost exclusively piano music and songs. They are all small pieces, elegiac and melodious: water-colours in music of time and landscape.
