After the business of the Tenby and District Arts Club AGM was concluded last Friday, Roz Oak took us on a tour of Yeats' Ireland, starting in Dublin. Yeats lived in Howth after he was 15, and went daily to his father's studio on St. Stephens Green. Trinity College, founded in 1592, is one of the seven ancient universities of Britain and Ireland. The library contains over five-million books, including the Book of Kells (an illuminated Gospel), Book of Durrow, and Book of Howth. The college was built around a quadrangle, with the Campanile, or bell tower an iconic landmark. William Butler Yeats lived in Merrion Square.

Roz then moved on to Lower Lough Erne, near Enniskillen. The G8 summit took place here in 2012. It runs for 26 miles almost to the Atlantic, and has waves of open sea dimensions. The remains of a 15th century Franciscan Abbey where the Annals of the Four Masters, chronicles of medieval Irish history, were written. There is a famous surfing beach at Rossnowlagh.

Roz had an evening cruise on 'The Lady of the Lake' around the 154 islands of Lower and Upper Lough Erne.

Florence Court, an Irish demesne house, is where parts of Blandings were filmed. It was given to the National Trust after a devastating fire in March 1955, when Lady Enniskillen rang her husband at his club to let him know, and he said, 'What do you expect me to do about it?'

Mulllaghmore, the Great Summit, is dominated by Ben Bulben mountain, and the Castle of Classiebawn, a baronial house built by Lord Palmerston, and used by Lord Mountbatten. Yeats' burial place is at Drumcliffe, giving his epitaph, from his poem 'Under Ben Bulben', Yeats proposed three times to Maud Gonne, an English heiress, but she married Irish nationalist, Major John Macbride.

The final visit was to Belleek Pottery, a porcelain company that began trading in 1884, and then it was back to Dun Laoghaire, and the ferry back to Pembrokeshire, out of Dublin Bay, past the Poolbeg lighthouse, constructed in 1767 at the end of the Great South Wall.

This concludes the Tenby and District Arts Club programme for this season. It will restart on the first Friday in October. The Summer Art Exhibition will be held in St. Johns Church Hall in July.

A.D.