Three things about Peter Somerville-Large (70) which are useful to know. First, yes he is a relative of Edith Somerville; Second, he is not to be confused with Christopher Fitzsimons, who has also written a travel book about west Cork; third, he doesn't know how many books he has written to date. And he moves house a lot, some 20 times in the course of his married life so far.
Home is currently a converted mill in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny: a rambling edifice of huge high cold rooms, which are more on the scale of an arts centre than mere living rooms and hallways. He shows off the rooms, the walls of which are crowded with paintings and photographs, commenting; "Living here is like living in a theatre. We can make the place as big or small as we like by closing off parts of it."
Somerville-Large has just published another coffee table book, Ireland's Islands: Landscape, Life, and Legends, with photographs by David Lyons. The island fascination goes back a long way: Somerville-Large spent a large part of his childhood on a small island in the Kenmare River, close to Sneem, which his father bought in 1932.
"He didn't believe in comfort. When we arrived there, it was all heather and rock and gorse. Michael Scott designed the house around the style of a ship, so we didn't have a staircase; there were ladders everywhere. We had Kerry cows . . . and did all our own fishing. We were very self-sufficient. Some millionaire owns it now," he adds, with an inflection of mild distaste on the word "millionaire".
"A lot of people of my background hate being described as `Anglo-Irish'," he says. "I guess growing up, one wasn't a Catholic, and that made one slightly dislocated. I was neither fish nor fowl. The Anglo-Irish are dead as ducks anyway. I want to be called Irish." He does, however, say "one" a lot, asks quite specifically which street I live on in Dublin, inquires if I'm married, and, when talking of his only child, a daughter Vanessa, who lives in Australia, says with quite splendid vagueness: "She's married to a man who runs yachts." Is this sort of thing simply generational, or class-driven? Possibly both, but frankly, it does come across as being a bit, well, Anglo-Irish.
His wife, Gillian, has just come back from her shopping expedition to Thomastown, glowing with the sharp wind, and carrying parcels. "Would you call yourself Anglo-Irish?" he asks her.
She doesn't miss a beat. "Me, not so much. You - yes," she says on her way past the table.
He laughs and shrugs. "If I'm travelling around Ireland, I get taken for an Englishman," he says. "I usually say I'm from Liverpool, it's easier than explaining."
Liverpool? Somerville-Large's accent would fit right in with the Home Counties, but to think he would pass for a Liverpudlian is like plonking a Dubliner down in Belmullet and confidently expecting them to pass for an indigenous local. Why Liverpool? It was only later that I wondered if Somerville-Large thought by saying Liverpool, a city which received many emigrants over the decades, that his accent might pass for a second-generation kind of English-Irish one. Whatever the reasons, it says quite a lot about his own uncertainty about where he belongs.
Peter Somerville-Large had a upbringing which would not be the Irish norm. Raised in a huge isolated house, he has lived in large houses all his life, whether conversions such as the Thomastown mill, or country houses: his best-selling book of recent years was the bestselling Irish Country Houses, A Social History. His father sent him and his brother to school in Sweden at the age of nine, "because of the war. I'm not terribly sure why Sweden; he probably thought it would be safer."
After Trinity, his first job was in Afghanistan. The circumstances couldn't have been more surreal: he was teaching Milton's poetry in Kabul's Military College to Afghan cadets and officers who couldn't speak English. "It was a non-job really," he admits cheerfully. But the main attraction was that it was Afghanistan, faraway and exotic: the first stop on what turned out to be a lifetime of journeying the globe. "Perhaps the restlessness comes from numerous ancestors who couldn't make a living in Ireland and had to keep moving on," he opines.
He went on to travel through central Asia in the 1950s, with a vague idea of reaching Siberia. Through a Nepalese friend he met in Delhi, he was able to travel to Nepal, which was not then open to foreigners: it was to be another decade and more before Kathmandu was to become an international hippie destination and have one of its medieval streets renamed Freak Street. "When I went to Kathmandu first, there were only three cars in the city."
He also travelled to remote areas of Pakistan, long before the Karakoram Highway was laid; to the still-arcane and little-visited country of Buthan; to Borneo; and on to Australia. "In those days, everyone travelled by ship; it was slower. Nowadays, all you have to do is go to a travel agent and buy a ticket and you're there."
He likes Colin Thubron and Jonathan Raban as travel writers. "I'm not all that mad on Paul Theroux. I think Bruce Chatwin invented an awful lot, but I don't particularly see that as a bad thing. A travel book comes out of the imagination as well, doesn't it?" He says he's always been good friends with Dervla Murphy, who would be more or less his contemporary. "She's much stronger than me, much tougher. She's much more of a real traveller than me - I'd be nervous of travelling with her!"
At the moment, he is "dying to get out of Ireland again". Gillian rarely travels with him, although she did accompany him when he was researching his new book, visiting those islands he hadn't been to before, such as Inishbofin. He'd like to go back to Afghanistan. "I might be getting ancient, but there are still places I'd love to see before I kick the bucket."
Ireland's Islands; Landscape, Life, and Legends, by Peter Somerville-Large, with photographs by David Lyons, is published by Gill and Macmillan, £14.99
