The thrill of the chase: a hunting artist’s horsey yarn

Barry Delaney is a throwback to the old Irish landed gentry who rode hard, drank hard, and lived life to the full. His younger brother, Darren, is cut from a different cloth; dependable, unimaginative, a farmer to his square finger-tips, destined for agricultural college and, eventually, inheritance of the family farm.

Sheep May Safely Graze is, I hope, the sometimes poignant, frequently hilarious tale of the young brothers Delaney as they find their feet in the world, fall in and out of love, and gradually come to realise that taking the man out of Tipperary is a simpler matter than taking Tipperary out of the man.

Family, farming and foxhunting are the themes threading their way through the story. Barry, living in self-imposed exile in England, pursues foxes and women with equal vigour, fleeing painful memories of his past and the one woman he truly loved. Darren, meanwhile, enrols at Battisford Agricultural College in Essex, his family's college. At Battisford, Darren learns to play, emerging gradually from beneath the shadow of his puritanical father and his vivid older brother. He is happier at Battisford than he has ever been in his life, but it is hard to ignore the fact that any British college with agriculture at its core is an institution with a sick heart. Farming continues to employ too many people and produce too much, under a Labour government that in the eyes of Darren's friends is not merely indifferent to the countryside, but is positively anti-countryside.

In his final year at college, Darren finds himself caught up in the horror of the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001. Over the spring of that year, he watches helplessly as British livestock farming goes down in flames around him. He prays that the disease will not cross the Irish Sea, and how much his own family’s farm and their way of life means to him is brought home to him as never before. There is a rich supporting cast: the boys’ glamorous, bewitching cousin Andrea; Barry’s quirky ex-girlfriend Sinead; his sardonic friend Tony Brennan; Edward Delaney, the flashy City banker who turned his back on family tradition; Vincent the one-eared squirrel; Tim Huxtable, the eccentric West Country farmer; Kevin “The Pope” Lannigan, one of the foulest people and truest friends Darren will ever meet.

The story sweeps from the timeless hill farms and sleepy villages of Co Tipperary to the splendour of England’s hunting shires and the glitter of London’s West End, from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. In Essex, Darren has his first sexual encounter, a bewildering, unexpectedly comic, but ultimately gratifying experience. A tentative, unlikely romance blossoms between him and bold, bad Essex girl Sally Buckingham, and when Sally is later launched on Tipperary and the Delaney family the scope for comedy – or disaster – is almost limitless.

On Exmoor, Darren has his first look at an older, wilder England and is thrilled by the primitive, brutal purity of hunting the wild red deer on the moor. Barry embroils himself in an ill-advised love affair with a glamorous, married Londoner, falls foul of hunt saboteurs in Sussex, and the feeling that he has been too long in England begins to build in him. It is the death of the boys’ father that eventually draws the threads of the novel back together, to their home in Tipperary where Barry must finally confront his past, and where Darren finds taking on the mastership of the Delaney acres a far greater challenge than he had anticipated.

In a dramatic break with tradition, this is a novel set largely in rural Ireland which is not based upon the sufferings of underprivileged Catholic children growing up in the 1950s. Sheep May Safely Graze was written as a kind of tribute to all the things I have loved most. The fictional Delaney family whose words and deeds were picked out key by key on a secondhand laptop on many a long, lonely night served as a link to my home and my people while I was away from them.

Writing the novel was very much a labour of love; it is not the book I would have written were I aiming for commercial success. In terms of literary style, I was influenced by the horsey yarns of K M Peyton and Somerville and Ross, but also by Larry McMurtry’s effortless storytelling, the humour and action in George MacDonald Fraser’s novels, and fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay’s gift for manipulating the reader’s emotions.

Although there are characters like Sally who are outsiders looking in, on the whole I tried to write an immersive novel, in which farming, hunting and rural life, in all their life-and-death immediacy, are seen through the eyes of people who were brought up with those things and see nothing exceptional in any of it.

Sheep May Safely Graze was written in fits and starts over several years when I was in my early twenties. I was many things in many places during that time – undergraduate at agricultural college in Essex, stunt rider in Devonshire, riding instructor in London and South Africa. Wherever I was, I never forgot that I came of a long line of Tipperary farmers. The tumbled fields and unkempt hedgerows of south Tipperary, the hounds and the horses and lovely Slievenamon and the patient River Suir were all in my blood, and they would wait for me.