The span of Ted Hughes’s extraordinary relationship with Ireland informs three letters he wrote in 1992. On 19 October he told Oona and Terence McCaughey, his friend since Cambridge, of a recent journey he and Nick had made, their first for several years, into the West. The trip had brought relief from ‘suffocating England’, and ‘freedom from the English psycho-social control system’: ‘Ireland has inner space – which England almost wholly lacks’ (LTH 615). He was ‘mightily relieved to see how little things had changed – in some ways, things are better. At least around Lough Arrow, in Sligo they are’ -- since his previous visits, fishing for pike and trout in 1979, 1982 and 1984. Here, with their old friend Barrie Cooke, they found inner space, literally, by crawling, as Cooke made sure I did when I visited him in 2012, into a megalithic passage tomb at Carrowkeel, older than the pyramids. Hughes described this as ‘Very good.’(LTH 615) Two days later he told Seamus Heaney he ‘sat inside for about an hour, completely happy’.1 And ‘Barrie’s place’s is an absolute joy. Maybe that house is founded on a stray chunk of the Dagda’s cauldron, right there up on the battlefield.’