Ireland: Lifting the Green Curtain

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The summer sky still breaks over the land in splinters of green, gold or luminous waves of grey, staining the hills blue and purple and vermilion, heaping the valleys with shimmering veils of mist. In that weird, wet Atlantic light—or so they say—the swarthy chieftains and pale queens who once ruled the five kingdoms of Celtic Ireland still clatter across country. As the island's endless sleight-of-sky creates and dissolves horizons, the landscape seems dreamily unreal. The reality of Ireland is special: it lies on a border region where tragedy and...