ANOTHER LIFE

CONNACHT'S old stones can be oddly grudging with their history: there is so much of it and yet little. There's the ancient past, furnished satisfactorily with tombs and raths and carved crosses, and there's yesterday's landscape of Famine gables and tumbled walls. But of the day before yesterday - those long centuries between the Celts and the clachans - the physical evidence is slim.

You could almost suppose that up to Cromwell's "Hell or Connacht", Connemara, for instance, must have been an empty wilderness. That would be wrong on two counts - first, in thinking that his edict sent more than a handful of land owning families to the west; second, in supposing there weren't plenty of ordinary people living there already.

Looking at Connemara in 1709, Molyneux found it hard to imagine "an inhabited country so destitute of all signs of people and arts as this is; yet here I learn live multitudes of barbarous, uncivilised Irish". Most of them were certainly poor, which is why they left so little mark: a tangle of ambiguous field-walls and the rocky footings of cabins. Only the O'Flaherty tower-houses, at the coast, lived on to give shelter to lobster-pots and choughs.

A rare excitement, then, the other day, to be taken to a ruin tucked into a fold of rushy land in the uplands of south Connemara: a well-built, if roofless, farmhouse, with little outbuildings, dating from 1693. It is tucked so snugly into its hillside hollow and the granite blocks are so thickly cushioned in moss, as to make the homestead virtually invisible from more than a few metres away. An old crab-apple tree has grown huge beside it and black-thorns, hung with grey-green lichens, crowd against the walls.

The house was built by a mercenary soldier from General St Ruth's army, who took refuge in Connemara after the Battle of Aughrim. We have that on the word of a direct descendant, for the same family held the farm for the past 300 years. Their second house was built in the 1840s, on higher ground, and still stands, more or less intact, beside the third house. a bungalow with all mod cons.

All three, with a holding of, nearly 200 acres - most of it virgin mountain bog - now form, the homestead of friends of mine, a couple who can scarcely their temerity or their luck. They have moved their lives by six minutes in a car, up into the hills from one of Connemara's crowded coastal suburbs and found what seems to them like paradise.

He is a teacher who grows culinary herbs in tunnels and has already carved out a good market among the region's stores and hotels. She is a professional musician from a well-known local family, who was beginning to feel shut in by the building-up of Connemara's coastline. They have three young daughters, whose instant approval of the farm was vital to the move. "Did you see the kestrel?" asked Dearbhaill, aged eight.

From the five acres they had been looking for, to close on 200, was a huge scaling-up of ambition. But it was also one that fitted their dream about conserving a piece of open countryside and handing it on. The bog that flanks their few green fields will never be machine-cut, ploughed up or planted with conifers, but left to grow heather for the hares and some of the last grouse in Connemara.

There's a great, sheltered spot for the tunnels, good grass for a small flock of organic-premium sheep. Deer, maybe . . . ostriches, probably not...

I recognised the reveries that come with walking one's own bit of land, the half-stunned excitement that still possesses my friends, even on a day closed in with grey drizzle.

ONCE the road is left behind, it promptly ceases to be, as if the farm exists at some different point in time. Off that way, a big lake with islands suddenly materialises, the sort that tunes a dazzling cobalt on a sunny winter's day. A quick sortie through the sheep finds a sea-trout stream with mossy boulders any tracks of otters. Beyond it, the farm's own bog rises up to make the horizon. And then, of course, there's that very special ruin, awaiting resurrection from the thorns.

There's general pleasure. and perhaps some amazement, that locals should have bought the place, rather than Dutch or German people. The decision not to plant the bog with conifers is regarded, perhaps, as quixotic given the example of Coillte's distant plantations. There will be visits on spec from forestry contractors and others, no doubt mom would-be turf machines: all will make puzzled retreats.

We'll have to stop feeling there's something wrong with people buying land and not doing anything with it, or not very much, or not the expected things. Half the small farms of the west are occupied by people who find themselves farmers by fate or accident and who have no real affinity with the land or with animals (still less with nature).

A few hills away to the west of the farm is my own little plot of inviolable bog: one anonymous acre in a stretch of more than 1,000 in the town-land of Cloghernagun. I've just paid £30 for it and the EU has added £90 more, part of a deal by which the Irish Peatland Conservation Council is being helped to buy the whole bog for about £120,000.

It's a superb example, says the PCC, of lowland blanket bog, "a lake-studded pleateau of peat, criss-crossed by streams with swampy margins, all teeming with a rich variety of wildlife." The vendors are Udaras na Gaeltachta, who bought the bog originally for turf extraction. Now, they can see the virtue of leaving it intact as a wildlife haven, just up the hill from the en-suite B&Bs. How Ireland changes, swampy margins and all.