IT came through the post, a fine, glossy, 200 page magazine called The World of Hibernia, vol 2, number 2, autumn 1996.
It is a fine production with one article which should be read by every person in the counties south of the Border, simply titled The Glens of Antrim.
But it is about more than the Glens. It is about the quality of the people of north Antrim of their bloody history, their present quality of life and, above all, of the implications of their closeness to Scotland. It is an area, writes Deirdre McQuillan, which was never "planted", that is colonised by the British. Here the Scottish coast in only 12 miles away. The author quotes Seamus Clarke, a local historian, as saying. "Around here you could see the Scottish coast line, while Dublin and Belfast you couldn't see at all."
One quotes Tony McAurey, whose family is one of the oldest in the Glens. "Anyone who looks at the Glens with his back toward Scotland is looking at the country with the one eye shut."
All along that coast you may see cars on the Mull of Kintyre, and their headlights at night. There are some 10,000 people living in the Glens, she tells us, predominantly Catholic and hill farmers, with their stonewalled "ladder farms" climbing up the often precipitous valley sides.
As elsewhere, they no longer grow oats, flax, vegetables, fruit and potatoes. Malachy McSparran, one of the best known men in north Antrim, says that very few grow potatoes, very few have hens... all the Glens have sheep and cattle.
Deirdre McQuillan declares an interest. Her father first took her to Dunluce Castle on the north coast when she was about eight years of age. Originally this was a McQuillan castle, he told her, and the brave, hospitable but improvident Lords of the Route had been ousted by the McDonnells, originally gallow glasses from Scotland. When Deirdre was eight the old, unique, Giants Causeway tram, a technical wonder in its time, devised by one Traill (Anthony perhaps), from the area, had been long abolished. It had a debt of something like £30,000. If the Northern Ireland Tourist Board could re-create the ten miles or so of route, it might be worth thirty million to them.
You swung along in this odd series of tram carriages, often open, toast rack affairs, and some who have travelled it used to swear they could look dawn into a seagull's eye as it sat on its nest, just yards below. More another day.