A bay mare was standing over a foal curled up sleeping at her feet. Yawning and struggling to keep her eyes open, she was snoozing herself in the sun-drenched paddock of a small white farmhouse.

If I had stopped the car to admire the scene every time the scene was this perfect, then I would not have made a mile’s progress on my third house-hunting trip to Ireland.

In the country lanes, drivers slowed and waved to me on every bend. A cyclist put his foot on the ground and grinned as though genuinely pleased to see me. Everyone here has time. That’s how it seems anyway.

In a market square, I sat on a bench and sipped a takeaway coffee bought in a supermarket. ‘How are you today?’ said the lady, like she really wanted an answer. All the shop windows say ‘Closed on Tuesdays’; the restaurants are ‘Open Friday and Saturday nights’. Good for them.

A short drive up the lane and I was early for my appointment to view what turned out to be more of a holiday home. And the 18 acres, while picturesque, were being pounded by the run-off from the hillside above, pouring through a land drain.

I went from there to another farm that was derelict but somehow inhabited. In one room was the largest heap of plastic bags stuffed with empty Guinness cans you ever saw. Hundreds of them. The agent shook his head solemnly. ‘Poor bloke,’ I said. We stood chatting about mortality for a while.

After shaking his hand to say goodbye, I decided to drive inland to a complete wild card. I left the West Cork coastline to drive almost vertically up a steep range and down the other side. I landed in a valley with Mount Hillary in front of me. At a crossroads, a sign advertised dancing on a Sunday night: in the open air, at the crossroads.

I often feel I’m not house hunting for a particular place, more a time, and if this is not going back in time I don’t know what is.

I turned by the agent’s sign on to a smaller road, then another sign sent me down an even narrower lane, with grass in the middle. I hadn’t passed a car for a good 20 minutes. I was in the middle of what some might call nowhere. And very nice it was too. I drove on and another agent’s sign marked the driveway, lined with apple trees in pink blossom.

A man was painting the white wall at the side of the gate as a little girl in a full-skirted dress, her hair in plaits, played beside him. I put down my window. ‘Are you the owner?’ He was. I apologised for the intrusion, said I had rung the agent last minute and he’d be here in an hour. Would he mind if I looked around? I added that I thought the place was heaven.

He smiled, looked puzzled: ‘Really?’ And the little girl laughed. To them, perhaps, it was just ordinary. He said it was his sister’s farm. ‘Go on in, the back door’s open.’

‘I might just sit in the car and eat my lunch until the agent gets here,’ I said. ‘Oh, go on into the house and use the kitchen if you like.’

It was a bungalow, dated but liveable. I wandered back out into the sun and down a track to find an old farmyard, and beyond it 45 acres framed by a distant mountain on each side. The fields were emerald. Cows grazed in them. The sound was of birdsong, nothing else. When another wily old agent arrived, he talked me into it in no time. I sent the builder boyfriend pictures and he agreed.

But in Surrey a day later, an offer from the buyer interested in my cottage was so low it made the whole thing seem impossible. And all I could think about were the practicalities, like loading the horses on to a lorry for a sea crossing. I was driving along the lane to my house worrying, when a car came up behind me.

I didn’t know what was happening until I heard the young guy inside screaming through the open window. He tailgated me, swerving from side to side. I pulled in. But instead of going round, he stopped, got out, and told me he was going to kill me for slowing him down.

A farmer friend rounded the corner in his tractor and I flagged him down. The boy racer lost his bottle and fled. The farmer said: ‘The same thing happened to someone else down here the other day. Are you all right?’

Back at home, I wrote the low offer on a piece of paper and scribbled my calculations around it.