Descending then toward the junction, he spotted an old man, ruddy-faced and gaunt, standing in the car park of the pub. Beside him was an old Land Rover. A Wicklow collie sat in the passenger seat, apparently following its master’s lead in watching Minogue and Kilmartin. The old man’s long face had something of a horse about it, Minogue decided, especially with the breezes tossing the tufts of snowy hair that swelled out from under his tweed hat.

Kilmartin had spotted him too.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” he said. “There’s a look to them.”

Political correctness was still alien to Kilmartin, but Minogue had to admit that his friend was probably right. This was borderland after all, the edge of the Pale in former times, raider’s country. Rachel Tynan’s family name had been Weekes, a name with a distinctly Cromwellian sound to it, to Minogue’s ear.

He had often forgotten that the Tynans’ mixed marriage meant something to other people, especially because Tynan had spent a few years as a Jesuit seminarian. He had once heard a whispered superstition concerning why their marriage had remained childless.

“They’re very organized,” said Kilmartin. “That’s all I’m saying. I mean there he is, making sure that iijits like us find their way up to this church.”

The turn off the motorway seemed to have awoken Kilmartin.

“She planned it all, I heard,” he said, warming to his topic. “Mrs. Tynan, I’m talking about. Rachel, I should call her now, I suppose. She planned this place here, the event even.”

Recent years had drawn her back, Minogue had heard, and especially as her illness advanced, here to where she had spent her childhood. Those visits had resulted in a series of paintings of the bog with a grandeur of space and skies that Minogue had believed that no-one but himself had marvelled at.

He felt the tires bite loose gravel by the verge of the road.