When I first met Martin Fletcher in the early 1990s he was Washington correspondent of the London Times and not all that interested in Northern Ireland. Then he got caught up in reporting the Gerry Adams visa wars and became fascinated enough to accept a posting in Belfast "when my employers at the Times decided to punish me for some great sin, the exact nature of which I have yet to ascertain".
After his first few days covering sectarian warfare he was inclined to the Reginald Maudling view of Northern Ireland as a "bloody awful country". But his wife Katy loved it from the start and the family was warmly welcomed by its new neighbours in Helen's Bay. The people might have done terrible things to each other in Northern Ireland, Fletcher writes, but they are "warm, generous, intelligent and fun", and even staunch republicans "whose hatred of the British in the abstract rarely extends to Britons individually", could not be kinder to outsiders.
He quickly discovered there is more to Northern Ireland than its bloody awful side, just as he found that there was more to the United States than Washington when he wrote his first book, Almost Heaven: Travels Through the Backwoods of America. Fletcher's travels through the backwoods of Northern Ireland led him to conclude one day, as he was driving near Dungiven and passers-by were waving to him, that beyond Belfast, it "is really just one huge farm".
As a reporter he had a unique opportunity to explore the under-reported events and places which make the North worthy of such a book. He subjected himself to St Patrick's Purgatory, one of the toughest pilgrimages in Christendom, went eel fishing on Lough Neagh, where the fishermen never eat eels, poached with a poacher in Plumbridge who told him to pretend he was relieving himself if caught, and played billiards with Alan Brookeborough at Colebrooke, the home of Basil Brooke, the former Northern Ireland Prime Minister. Colebrooke is now a superior guesthouse and sounds more attractive than when I was once shown around in the 1970s by the late Lord Brookeborough, who gaily informed me that the rows of mounted skulls in the . dining room were "mostly deer, and one or two Roman Catholics".
Fletcher spent a day at the all-Ulster Lambeg Drumming championships, which produced a "moment of epiphany" when he suddenly found, after being deafened all day, that he could distinguish good drumming from bad, with the best sounding like the "chimes of a church bell that's been struck". He took another day to follow roadbowling, or "bullets", in Co Armagh, which produced a moment of profit when he pocketed £25 after betting £10 on the winner. He joined a pheasant shoot on Rathlin Island and climbed the Mournes. He visited a poteen maker in the Antrim Glens, a dispenser of charms in Fermanagh (who failed to cure his dandruff) and a man in Comber called Noel Spence with a cinema in his garden showing only 1950s science horror films.
He discovered, in other words, that Northern Ireland is a place much maligned by bloody awful visiting politicians like Mr Maudling. The violence of course is never far away. Fletcher is a tourist of the Troubles too, and takes the reader into loyalist and republican hot spots and to some atrocity sites. The end result is a subjective book, not a comprehensive travel guide, and some local readers will be disappointed at the dismissal or omission of places like Newry, Strabane, Dungannon, Rostrevor, and Warrenpoint, and such an obvious silver lining as the Auld Lammas Fair in Ballycastle. The profile of the Rev Ian Paisley also does not quite belong here, though he could perhaps be considered an ancient monument.
But these are quibbles. The author has done prodigious research and unearthed some wonderful characters to produce a beautifully-written book, rich in texture, humour, anecdote and historical resonance.
Surprisingly, he sometimes found it hard to get co-operation. Some people refused to be interviewed, like Lady Dufferin of Clandeboy, upon whom the author exacted terrible revenge by refusing to buy a Christmas tree from her estate. He also found that Northern Ireland does not make enough of its heroes. He could not find a plaque marking the spot in Belfast where John Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre. "You never see the good stuff in this place," said an old man who located it for him behind a Smirnoff advertisement. "It's all the bad things they show you. It's just troubles, troubles, troubles." This charming book will go a long way to redress that.
Conor O'Clery is Asia Correspondent of the Irish Times