Furthermore ...

Quietly, under this Northern Ireland pasture, the tectonic plates are grumbling

He can read the countryside like that, too. It is a parchment recording our history. There are Protestant farms and Catholic farms. There are forces determined to maintain the boundaries between them.

"You'll often hear it said that such a piece of land will never be sold to a Catholic," he says. "Or the other way round. That's how it is." And it is no surprise that it should be like that, for the history of division in Ulster is a history of land and territory. The Plantation of Ulster was a claiming of land for settlers who were, roughly speaking, the ancestors of the people who are now the backbone of unionism.