(1) Big houses in Ireland are,I am told, very isolated.I say "I am told"because the isolation, or loneliness of my own house is only borne in on me, from time to time, by the exclamations of travelers when they arrive."Well,"they exclaim with a hint of denunciation,"you are a long way from everywhere!"I suppose I see this the other way round: everywhere seems to have placed itself a long way from me-if "everywhere"means shopping towns, railway stations or Ireland's principal through roads. But one's own point of departure always seems to one normal.(I have grown up accustomed to seeing out of my windows nothing but grass. sky, tree, to being enclosed in a ring of almost complete silence and to making journeys for anything that I want). Actually,a main road passes my gates(though it is a main road not much travelled); my post village, which is fairy animated, is just a mile up the hill, and daily bus, now, connects this village with Cork. The motor car demolishes distances, and the telephone and wireless keep the house knit up, perhaps too much with theworld. The loneliness of my house, as of many others, is more an effect than a reality. But it is the effect that is interesting.

(2) (When I visit other big houses,I am struck by some quality that they all have not so much isolation as mystery). Each house seems to live under its own spell, and that is the spell that falls on the visitor from the moment he passes in at the gates. The ring of woods inside the territory wall conceals, at first, the whole territory from the eye: this looks, from the road, like the woods in sleep, with a great glade inside. Inside the gates the avenue often describes loops, to make itself of still more extravagant length; it is sometimes arched by beeches, sometimes silent with moss. On each side lie those tree-studded grass spaces we Anglo-lrish call lawns and English people puzzle us by speaking of as "the park."On these browse cattle, or there may be horses out on grass.A second gate(generally white-painted, so that one may not drive into it in the dark) keeps these away from the house in its inner circle of trees. Having shut this clanking white gate behind one, one takes the last reach of avenue and meets the faded, dark-windowed and somehow hypnotic stare of the big house. Often a line of mountains rises above it, or a river is seen through a break in woods. (But the house, in its silence. seems to be contemplating the swell or fall of its own lawns).

(3) (The paradox of these big houses is that often they are not big at all. Those massive detached villas outside cities probably have a greater number of rooms). We have of course in Ireland the great houses-houses Renaissance Italy hardly rivals, houses with superb facades, colonnades, pavilions and, inside, chains of plastered, painted saloons, but the houses, that I know best, and write of, would be only called"big"in Ireland-in England they would be"country houses,"no more. They are of adequate size for a family, its dependants ,a modest number of guests. They gave few annexes, they do not ramble; they are nearly always compactly square. (Much of the space inside(and there is not so much space) has been sacrificed to airy halls and lobbies and to the elegant structure of staircases. Their facades(very often in the Italian manner) are not lengthy, though they may be high. Is it height-in this country of otherwise low building-that got these Anglo-Irish houses their"big"name? Or have they been called "big"with a slight inflection-that of hostility, irony? One may call a man "big"with just that inflection because he seems to think the hell of himself.

(4) These houses, however, are certainly not little. Let us say that their size, like their loneliness, is an effect rather than a reality. Perhaps the wide, private spaces they occupy throw a distending reflection on to their walls. And, they were planned for spacious living for hospitality above all. Unlike the low, warm, ruddy French and English manors, they have made no natural growth from the soil-the idea that begot them was a purely social one. The functional parts of them-kitchens and offices, farm-buildings, outbuildings-were sunk underground, concealed by walls or by trees; only stables (for horses ranked very highly) emerged to view, as suavely planned as the house.

In Paragraph 1, the word "denunciation"means ( ).