In the High Pyrenees: A New Life in a Mountain Village

In the High Pyrenees: A New Life in a Mountain Village

by Bernard Loughlin (Author)

Synopsis

On the day after the death of Franco, Bernard Loughlin made his first visit to Farrera, a village in the Catalan Pyrenees. There, in a chilly seventeenth-century church, he and his Belfast sweetheart, Mary, were married; and there, by candlelight, Mary gave birth to their first child. Bernard and Mary spent the next two decades in Ireland, running the artists' retreat at Annaghmakerrig. When they left in 1999, under the shadow of a terrible crime committed by a neighbour against their children, their destination was Farrera. They were starting a new life. "In the High Pyrenees" is a loving and often hilarious account of the smells, sensations and neighbourly intrigues of a mountain village. In gorgeous, vivid prose, Bernard Loughlin tells the many stories of this out-of-the-way place, where a varied cast of outsiders live alongside a handful of remaining Catalan peasants and their modernizing offspring. This is a tale of struggles - to restore an old house and garden on a vertiginous mountainside; to wangle a mortgage from sceptical Catalan bankers; to start a business; to overcome the ghosts of the Loughlins' Irish past. And it is a story of joy - in the warmth of village hospitality, in the spectacular Pyrenees landscape, and in the Loughlins' growing certainty that this extraordinary place is home.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Edition: New
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 03 Jun 2004

ISBN 10: 184488032X
ISBN 13: 9781844880324

Author Bio
Bernard Loughlin was born in 1950 in Belfast, and attented the Queen's University there. After working at various jobs around Europe, and then spending a year in Farrera de Pallars in the Catalan Pyrenees, he and his wife Mary Rogan returned to Ireland. In 1981 he became the first Resident Director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan, the well-known artists' retreat. In 1999 Bernard and Mary moved back to Farrera, where they continue to live.