The Birr Vintage Week and Arts Festival shook off the shackles of the modern world, writes MICHAEL HARDING

I WAS IN the courtyard café of Birr Castle, Co Offaly last week, admiring a harp carved from wood by Werner Groll.

Groll grew up in a forest in Germany, where the peasants were allowed cut down old trees each year for fuel. He grew to love old wood. Last week, Birr hosted a number of his works all around the town.

At one of the outdoor tables, I had Earl Grey tea, and a cake; a simple sandwich of cream and jam between soft cushions of sponge, named after queen Victoria, who took a liking to cake, with afternoon tea, in the years following the death of her beloved Albert.

At other tables, people nibbled away at chocolate buns, and salad sandwiches.

There was an old man with a tattered red baseball cap, who was trying to mind his grand-daughter, an unruly little three-year-old who kept straining on the leash. She had her eye on the entrance to the toilets, probably wondering why so many people were coming and going.

Each time she moved, the old man would shout, “No, no, no, you can’t go in there; that’s the powder room,”, as if it might be an arsenal of gunpowder.

He asked me where I was from.

“Westmeath.” “Ah,” he said, “I suppose the ‘green peter’ is hopping on Lough Lane these nights.” I said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He explained that the green peter is larva that floats up to the surface of lakes in Westmeath in the evenings, during the summer, and hatches on the surface.

“You can see the little flies shake their wings dry and scuttle across the surface. And the trout go mad for them; though there’s not many trout left,” he concluded, and he fell silent.

There were oodles of old things in Birr last week. There was vintage tennis with prizes for the best-dressed lady and gent. A flower festival, a night of vintage music, from wild gypsy airs to romantic Neapolitan songs, a parade of vintage cars and vehicles, and horses and hounds, and at the weekend there were ferret displays, archery, clay shooting, gundogs, and a fly-casting competition.

“I take care of my grand-daughter,” the old man joked, “and her mammy takes care of me.” I headed off, up town, along Oxmantown Mall, marvelling at the Georgian buildings; the stone houses with their wide doors, and fanlights, and arches that once opened into stable yards; an old world so completely intact that I could almost imagine Edwardian gentlemen taking snuff in the snugs of cosy bars and ladies in frills and frocks promenading along the malls, lilting little ditties from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

I felt I was getting a glimpse of an Ireland just as real as Peig Sayers’ cottage – but very different. A world more real, perhaps, than all the Celtic twaddle of myth and valour and keening women that infected the Irish imagination 100 years ago and which made the 20th century so stifling.

I saw four women in straw hats and long dresses; ladies straight out of the mid-19th century moving like ghosts along the street. They were giggling at rude Edwardian postcards in a shop window. “What’s the difference between sparrows and worms?” the furious teacher in the postcard asks the petrified boy. “I don’t know,” the sweaty lad replies. “I never had sparrows.”

There was a French market in the square for a couple of days, and above the malls and streets the sky was purple and still. Chestnut trees were ripe with chestnuts, and Virginia creeper spilled over the high walls from gardens I could not glimpse. Everything tried to be old; and everything old was beautiful.

I saw an exhibition of photographs – self-portraits by people with intellectual disabilities, who are also growing old. In one photograph, a woman sat at her lace-curtained window. Beneath it she had written “I am 57 years old. I live here in St Joseph’s unit. I share my living area with 23 other ladies, some of whom have become my friends. I used to go home for my summer holidays. But my mammy is not well any more.”

On John’s Mall, the third earl of Rosse smiled from his plinth; a man who in 1845 saw more clearly and farther than any other man in history, although the telescope he built in that year could not have helped him foresee the terrible Famine that was just around the corner, or the cataclysm of world war, 50 years later, which not only dragged his own grandchild to an early grave, but also precipitated the Trouble in Dublin’s GPO, changing all that vintage world forever, and putting an end to postcard humour.