The Columns

Most of what we write about Ireland is filed by place. The columns are filed by habit. They are the six things we keep doing here, year after year, in different counties and different weather: waiting out rain for the light that follows it, getting up before the country does, sitting in a bar for an hour before dinner, taking the slow road, sleeping in someone else's house, and leaving one afternoon a week entirely undefended.

We are Americans who moved here and never developed the local habit of underselling the place. What we did develop is a sense of when Ireland is at its best, which is almost never the hour the itinerary suggests. The columns exist to make that timing legible to a visitor who has one week and is trying to spend it well.

There are six, and there will stay six. A column is not a tag. Promotion requires a written brief and at least three existing entries that already share its voice, which is a deliberately high bar. If a thread cannot survive that test, it belongs inside an essay instead.