Google Earth has finally mapped my rural midlands home in Ireland. I'm so excited by that that I'm going to share it with blogland.
The house in the middle of the three is the one where I grew up. At that time, the house directly to the south-west wasn't there, neither were the one further away west-south-west or the ones directly south. It was just us and the small cottage to the north-east where my two uncles lived and my dad was born (explaining occasional discontent at my wanderlust - 50m is not a very long distance to move and therefore makes 1,400km away seem like another universe) .
The long thing under the 'e' of 'Rampage's House' is where our dogs live. They have a nice big area to run around in, and at night we put them into the adjoining kennels, which is an old train wagon from around the early 1900s. Sounds luxurious, but I have never been tempted to spent a night with them. 
In the field almost directly west from my house you can see an unusual ring-thingy. This is a prehistoric ring-fort which me and my sister called the 'Fairy Fort' when we used to play there as kids. There are many of these peppered around the countryside, with the result that details of the history of specific ones are very hard to come by.
Between the Fairy Fort and my house is a river which runs under our little road, and several others. It forms the eastern border of the Fairy Fort field. It was the bane of my mother's existence - it was responsible for more wet shoes, socks and trousers than you could imagine, as I found any river-based challenge nigh on impossible to resist. There wasn't a bank I hadn't jumped (or stubbornly attemped but bravely failed to jump), not a bridge I hadn't walked under, or a log I hadn't crossed. That river really was my kingdom, and luckily there weren't any other kids within a few kilometres to challenge that. Cos they would have been challenged. Fiercely.
The field directly beside us, the one with the three new houses, used to be full of buttercups and presented a wonderful, almost epileptic fit-inducing crescendo of, well, yellow, every spring. There also used to be horses there, as there's a large and actually quite well-known equestrian centre nearby. Of course, my sister loved the horses and, as a result, I didn't. Can't have a little boy agreeing with his big sister, now can we?
So that's it. My childhood in a nutshell. It was wonderful. I feel that I don't give my hometown or country much praise, and justifiably so, but this little corner of a little county on a little island means the world to me.
