The landscape of Down is shaped like a basket of eggs, the soft curves of the rounded hills, the drumlins, dipping and rising, layer behind layer into the distance. The Ards Peninsula is covered thus. In the early summer, distant tractors edge up the slopes, like far-away spiders, cutting the green sward for sileage. Later the reapers take the wheat and rye, trimming it forward, short back and sides. Squares of foreign rape-seed patch the hillsides yellow, between the high hedges decked with fuschia the colour of cardinals’ capes, veronica an archbishop’s purple, honeysuckle his gold braid, meadow sweet the white of his cuffs.

White washed pointed-topped gateposts guard the fields — their conical points uncomfortable for the spirits of the ‘wee folk’ who might curse kin or kith — and acting, like the now silent windmill towers, as markers for the distant fishermen, not home yet from the unpredictable seas.

Through Strangford’s Narrows the tide rushes at eight knots, swirling in scary ‘Routen Wheels’, pushing boats’ prows here and there. The Lough, home to thousands of over-wintering birds from the Arctic, is scattered with little gravelly islands, pladdies, left behind by the Ice Age’s glaciers.

At the top of the Lough is Newtownards with its little airfield where flying lessons are available, its old market cross concealing a tiny gaol, its fine 1765 Town Hall and its Somme Heritage Centre. Close by is Comber noted for its floury early potatoes, its antique shops, its village square monument to Sir Rollo Gillespie, the stuff of a dozen swashbuckling romances. Rollo eloped with an heiress, survived a duel when his opponent’s pistol ball bounced off his jacket’s brass button, saved himself from execution in Santo Domingo by masonic handshake, escaped the militia in Cork, after a brawl in a theatre, disguised as a nursing mother. When set upon by eight of his tenants in the West Indies he put six of them to the sword. Kidnapped in the Bosphorous he cured his captor of the fever and was released. He died leading a charge on a hill-fort in India, the words “One more shot for the honour of Down” on his lips.