dreaming eire; Seduced by the mysticism of Ireland, London-based antiques dealer Gordon Watson reminisces about his discovery of an old thatched cottage in County Waterford.

Byline: -as Told To Hamish Bowles

As a boy, I was always taken to places like the Lido in Venice and other salubrious watering holes for holidays, and as a young man-about-town I went to villas in the South of France or urbane country houses in England's manicured Home Counties. One childhood year, however, our family ended up, inexplicably, in a little stone cottage on the Yorkshire dales. It was magic, a magic that I had never been able to re-create.

Ireland was initially about a very different kind of experience. I was seduced at first by all that Anglo-Irish madness: the wonderful eighteenth-century houses with the overstuffed furniture, and the drinks with the Stones and the adventures at the Curragh-the Irish Derby. I had decided to rent the vast nursery wing of Castletown, a great Palladian house on the outskirts of Dublin. But then Penny Guinness (the chatelaine of nearby Leixlip Castle) said-and this was so prescient-"Gordon, I really wouldn't do that; it's absolutely frozen in winter, and Dublin is changing. In five or ten years it's going to be an international capital, and between the motorways and the crush at the airport you'll just be moving to another hectic city. Go south to Cork and have a look around there first; you'll discover another kind of Ireland." Happily, I followed her advice, and what I saw of rural Ireland on that trip triggered that childhood memory of the remote Yorkshire cottage, and the yearning I always had for such an earthy escape.

I'd had it in my mind to go shopping (I do like shopping!), and so I knew I was going to come back with something, anything. It could have been a piece of Irish Georgian furniture or a Donegal tweed jacket. But in the end it was a cottage. It was a June day, a dreaming summer day of blazing, blazing sunshine, not a scudding cloud in the sky. The sign in the tearoom-cum-realtor's office read atmospheric thatched cottage; a promising start. So after tea and scones, I set off with Jack Flanagan, the tearoom proprietor- cum-realtor, in his car, passing through unspoiled local market towns like Middleton, Youghal, and Lismore. As we drew nearer I saw children jumping off a Georgian bridge into the murkiness of the black river, and then we turned off the road and into a burreen-a dirt track-hemmed by hedgerows thick with bramble and flowers, and surrounded by hundreds of acres of emerald farmland. In the distance were the looming Knockmealdown mountains, which divide the fertile lands of Waterford from the wilderness beyond. I thought it was so romantic. I didn't drive at the time, and I had visions of getting a pony and trap and heading off to the village down this track, and it was going to be divine. The burreen was endless, and it seemed an age before we finally arrived in front of the house. The wild roses were growing, and the moment I walked in I just knew it was for me. The excitement was beyond anything.

Well, between the jigs and the reel, I didn't take possession until September. The day I returned, it was the darkest, rainiest, coldest, windiest day imaginable. That fabulous dirt track was now a mire of mud and squelch and cow dung. The crops had been harvested, so the green fields were completely bare, stubbly, barren. I went inside the bleak cottage and it was pitch-black-there was no natural light coming in anywhere. A mouse shot by, and I just stood in despair and thought, What have I done?

Advice from Mary Murray, the shopkeeper and fount of all wisdom, soon led me to Pat Kendrick, the builder. With Pat I opened up the old dairy to create a bedroom at one end of the cottage, and at the other we added a dining room that opened onto the gardens and the view of the orchards. Meals around the thirties travertine table became an event-especially after I'd

befriended the great local chefs Canice Sharkey from Isaac's, and Rory O'Connell and his sister Darina Allen from the famed ...