Michael Viney and his wife Ethna lived in the city, had successful jobs
in the media and had just turned forty when they made a life-changing
decision: to give up everything for a self-reliant existence on a remote
cottage farm in County Mayo, on the West Coast of Ireland. This
enchanting chronicle of life on the land follows the highs and lows of
one year in the Irish countryside. Since then, for sixty years, Michael
Viney's weekly columns in The Irish Times have established his
reputation as a uniquely compassionate and informed commentator on the
natural world, and undoubtedly one of Ireland's greatest nature writers.