Putting it one way Northern Ireland consists of the north eastern quarter of the island of Ireland part of an archipe lago of islands, known as the British Isles, situated on the continential shelf off the north-west of Europe. The climate is temperate and mild. The total population is under 1,600,000 with 297,000 souls in Belfast, 99,500 in Derry, 97,400 in Lisburn. There are six counties — Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone, six of the nine counties of the old Irish province of Ulster. Many still call it Ulster, just as, to older citizens, the 26 county Republic of Ireland, across the border, may still be the Irish Free State.

Putting it another way this is a small, unique place, once near the very edge of the known world. Cities are few, but not far between. Towns, atop hills or down on the banks of winding rivers by old stone bridges, have a central Diamond — “a Diamond as big as a square” — in Ulster parlance, often with a memorial to those fallen at the Somme in the First World War at its centre, plus four churches – Church of Ireland (Anglican), Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, often close together. Villages, cheerfully, self-contendedly far away from the motorways, are often glimpsed only as tops of church spires between the swell of the breast-like “drumlin” hills. Between them, farmhouses, sheltering in clumps of fir or sycamore, lie at the end of long lanes, amongst a patchwork of fields. The hedges, hawthorn and old, are white and pink with their own blossom in May, dog rose in June, decked with honey-suckle in July and speckled dark red with haws in September. Up the mountain slopes, hawthorn gives way to a tracery of hard-won stone walls and sheep replace the lowing herd.

There is silence amongst the trees in the forest parks, the dark green flashed with a jay’s blue. Larks sing over summer meadows, curlews mew over mud-flats, the rare corncrake crakes in the Fermanagh Lakeland’s moist warm nights, shearwaters call like ghosts after dusk, flighting in over the east coast’s rocks. Even on the roadside verges, the bright yellow of broom and the darker yellow and orange of gorse, relieves the day.

Outside the city centres, where the march of the multi-national retailers, building societies and burger bars is inevitable between the many inviting pubs, the soaring yet solid churches, the bulky Italianate architecture of the native banks, there are still city-villages where not every Art Deco cinema has given way to video club, not every boot mender to Chinese take-away, nor every haberdasher to pizza parlour, nor every Medical Hall become a pharmacy. Here there are still hardware stores which display their new spades and wheel barrows on the pavement. There are still men up at dawn to walk their greyhounds to the surrounding hills, men you might spot later in the mote-beam light-shaft of an afternoon pub, sipping a dark pint there before the after-office flirters break a silence to be broken louder, later by the country & western karaoke and even later still by late-licenced disco beat. There are also bars with jazz, good Irish music, and a treasured few, with silence.