That was his only contact with the outside world in the west. They moved furniture from Fermanagh to Mayo in a trailer. He replastered and painted walls. With Maisie and Catherine he set pines, fuchsia, holly. Then Sara came behind them with a watering can. They set camelias, roses, flame creepers and a single laburnum. Only to find the following spring that not one plant or tree had survived the winds. The next year, after taking advice, they set escallonia, but only two out of six plants remained alive. Lilies did not appear; crocuses put their heads above ground and died. No snowdrops came. Then they knew they were in an elementary world, of winds and weather.

Nothing survived the winters in Belmullet it seemed. To set a shelter belt became an obsession for the Adamses, as it was for all the people of Mullet.

But these revelations were all in the future. Those first weekends they spent there they set whatever came to hand. Cuttings from their garden in Fermanagh. Cuttings from the old Presbyterian Church. Good weather saw roses blossoming. Jonathan Adams carried the seamen’s Madonnas into a back shed. Then Maisie began to saw logs. The girls searched the beaches for stones to make a rockery. And he sat in a maple rocking chair, with a long sloping Boston back, that he’d bought in Sligo town, and in the long evening he rocked to and fro in the room he had chosen as his study, high in the north gable, with a view to Scotchport, and beyond that, the great dunes, where blown sand reached heights of near three hundred feet.

It was enough for him to know that it was out there waiting. All he had to do was to give it time. For years he had lain awake listening for the crash of glass as the window came in. Now it was the constant wind from the Atlantic he heard, walloping the rocks and scattering stinging sand. He watched the lines of tractors bearing turf home, and bought a trailer load. The farmer heeled it up against the side of the house and the family in the evenings tried building the sods into pyramid-shaped stacks like those of their neighbours.

Attacked by midges, they persevered haphazardly throughout the weekend, but only succeeded in leaving behind them a crumbling, half-finished stack of sods, all awry and proud and shapeless, when they left for home. Three weeks later they returned to find that some nameless neighbour had finished it in their absence. It stood beside the gable wall, tidy and perfect as a hermit’s beehive hut. This was a miracle in Jonathan Adams’ eyes. He tried to imagine from the look in the eye of neighbours passing who it was had built his turf house for him, but no one owned up.

He imagined that someone would call, and refer to it, this favour they had done the Adamses, but no one did.