Like many great artists, poet WB Yeats recognised the enduring human need to reconnect with an imagined, probably lost idyll when he wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree, in 1888: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.”

Give the oars a quick rattle in the oarlocks and settle onto the wooden seat before you undertake the 45-minute row from Ross Castle, Killarney, Co Kerry, to a stronghold of early Irish monasticism.

THE Douglas road house Innisfree has the perfect antidote to its busy main road location — its own separate rear access.