‘We’re waiting for the llamas to turn up,’ said the lady selling lottery tickets from her car in the supermarket car park. She had accosted the builder boyfriend as he walked by, shouting: ‘I want a word with you! We’re all very worried about what you’re going to be doing to that old house up there…’

The BB assured her we don’t have the money to do anything. Aside from tidying it up, we have no fancy plans, and we like old houses. As for llamas, yes, she had that right in terms of what most English people would be putting on the land. But we had brought our horses.

The good lady seemed reassured and within a few minutes she was selling him a lottery ticket from the village pitch and putt club: weekly members’ private lotto draw, jackpot €500.

Our new house in Ireland is magnificent in its old-world charm, stuffed full of furniture left behind, and religious paintings, because it was once a priest’s house. We cleared what we did not want and called the lady from the local charity shop who was happy to come up and have a cup of tea with us, tell us all the gossip, which was mostly about us, and load boxes of chintzy china, decanters, tea sets and clocks into her car.

I’ve always said I’ve been house hunting for a place in time, and finally it seemed we had boarded our time machine. Each morning I awake to a view so perfectly pastoral that I fancy someone has fixed a painting to the window pane as I sleep. The hills roll this way and that, a rising sun over the top. On a distant road, a car or tractor can just be made out, driving from one side of the horizon to the other. We’re eating everything local: the beef, the eggs, the cheese, the yoghurt is all from farms within a 20-minute radius. The supermarket only stocks local produce. We ate a sharply delicious apple pie one evening with cream from a local dairy in a tiny bottle.

I drove to a nearby town for a broom and a social security account, pulled up and parked the car in the first place that took my fancy, with not a parking warden in sight. Just a man in a van selling potatoes.

It was a harbour town, looking out to a wide expanse of sea – next stop America. All the shops here are painted different colours, each selling something different, from meat to brooms.

On Bank Holiday Monday we drove to Roaring Water Bay. It was a scorching hot day and I had to keep pulling over to take photos of the bright green fields, azure sea, golden mountains, deep blue sky. I went to Montana once and they called it Big Sky because the view is so wide, and here is the same. Everywhere you go the view goes on for ever.

It was so warm we ended up sunbathing outside a café where we ate crisp bacon sandwiches, before walking the dogs on a beach.

The day after that we drove into town for a vacuum cleaner, taking two cars as I wanted to go to the bank. The BB loaded the stuff we had bought from the hardware store and went home ahead of me.

Later, he explained that he had been driving along in his truck when a man flagged him down. He asked him to confirm his name then showed him a card, and formally cautioned him.

He told him that a neighbour had rung us in for having a bonfire in the farmyard.

It won’t be an Irish neighbour, the man from the council said, looking disgusted. He said to tell me, the owner of the house, to email him a receipt to show that we had hired a skip, which should cover it.

The BB looked up the rules that evening and insisted farms were allowed to burn brush. Over dinner, we went through the likely suspects.

We’ve made friends with all the farmers around us and we cannot believe it is any of them. We’ve shaken big calloused hands belonging to men with bags over their wellies and we’ve looked into their kind eyes and we’ve had a meeting of minds – I’m sure of it.

Added to which, we were warned by a lady down the lane that there is an English resident around here who has been ringing farmers in alleging hair-splitting breaches of EU rules.

What are the chances there’s a middle-class Surrey busybody somewhere on this hillside, and that we have come to the ends of the Earth only to find ourselves hemmed in with the thing we tried to run away from?