Woodbrook

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The greatest Irish memoir of them all, beguiling in its grace and beauty.

In 1932, before starting at Oxford, David Thomson arrived at Woodbrook to be a summer tutor to two girls. He fell in love with this Irish country house and the countryside around it; with the stories of the family who lived there, and with the wider story of Ireland and its long, tangled history. Most fundamentally, he fell in love with his young pupil, Phoebe. For ten years his life would be inextricably linked to them all.

In Woodbrook, David Thomson has produced a book that is at once history and elegy, but which never slips into sentimentality, although the world of country houses and tenant farming he describes was a fast disappearing one. Beautifully and simply written, it is one of the most important memoirs of Ireland. Building on his growing intimacy with the Anglo-Irish Kirkwood family, Thomson also became interested in their farming neighbours and with the land itself. Undulating green folds had once been potato beds, a physical reminder of the great potato famine that only one family in the village had survived. Every cottager knew history as it was transformed into legend – here a saint was hidden, there a priest had been murdered by the English.

Perhaps the fact that he was an outsider was what allowed Thomson to write so perceptively about Ireland – a fact that numerous Irish historians and writers have attested to. But Woodbrook is also Thomson’s own story, the bitter-sweet memories of an 18-year-old boy growing to a man, and of his love for a girl whose beauty ‘depended so much on movement that even a good portrait can only hint at it’.

Here, by special arrangement with Thomson’s widow, photographs of Woodbrook and its inhabitants are published for the first time. They provide a window into a vanished world and the perfect accompaniment to Thomson’s haunting elegy.