Profile: Knysna, South AfricaAfter years in Connemara and Killiney, poet Richard Murphy moved to South Africa - and last year, to an idyllic town called Knysna

I was drawn to Knysna at the end of last year by my daughter, Emily, who described it to me as the Kinsale of South Africa. She had fallen in love with the place while running in the Knysna Forest Marathon during the July 2004 Oyster Festival. After suffering two or three robberies in Durban, she longed for the safer, friendlier, and more beautiful environment of a small town with all the facilities for a comfortable modern family life and good schools for her two children.

Among a cosmopolitan community, young and old, the cult of the outdoors predominates in Knysna: golf, fishing, yachting, surfing, bird and wild animal and whale watching, mountain and forest trekking, walking for miles on pristine beaches, biking and camping, cooking braais on verandahs, dining in gourmet restaurants on oysters and line fish caught the previous night.

Emily tempted me to face the challenge of another move - good for the old brain, she argued. She and her husband, Jonathan Lee, are estate agents who have recently opened an office in Knysna for Engel and Völkers in association with Christie's International.

The climate, she told me, is better than that of Cape Town, as Knysna is more sheltered from the ocean winds. Rainfall is less than at Kinsale, but enough to keep the gardens green and flowering all the year round, with plants such as Cape Honeysuckle attractive to hummingbirds. Average high temperature in summer 23° and 18° in winter. Little or no summer humidity. An hour from the airport at George; five hours from Cape Town on the justly famous Garden Route.

So last November Emily took me on the longest and most exhilarating drive of my life, a thousand miles around the edge of the mountains of Lesotho, resting for a night; then across the parched sepia Martian landscapes of the Karoo, passing aloe and ostrich farms, here and there in the distance a great conical kopje crowned with a boulder, somewhat angled for a fall.

The road was straight and smooth, with little or no traffic till we crossed the mountains into the city of George.

Then, as in no other part of Africa, while driving up the coast to Knysna, I began to feel connected: for the Outeniqua Mountains to our north, composed of quartzite and schist, seemed like 20 big brothers of Connemara's Twelve Pins.

As we emerged from a forest of colonial pines and blue gums interspersed with more colourful native fynbos, we came to a long low bridge across an estuary opening into a lagoon that grew larger at every corner we turned on the main road tracking its banks; till we came to the vibrant congested centre of a busy upmarket tourist town, gleaming with global money that leaves indigenous poverty in the shade.

And when, the next day, we drove a bit higher, looking down across the town and the lagoon, I could recognise the likeness to Kinsale: not one, but two, Old Heads in the distance.

A narrow rocky channel passes between them through which the tide drains and refreshes the lagoon. The ebb exposes a large greeny area of salt marsh, attracting long-legged birds; and the marsh disappears at high water, when anglers fish from the shore.

At this moment I felt a profound calm displacing the fear and anxiety that always underlay our lives in Durban, the big city we had left. I think this calm flows from the symbolic feminine power of the Knysna lagoon and its headlands, enwombing the viewer. It reminded me of the relief and joy I felt, after hours of being tossed about in a pookhaun, of sailing between rocks for the first time into the serene tranquillity of the Inishbofin harbour.

I doubt if there are lovelier views from Killiney Hill or the Vico Road than there are from Knysna Heights and Paradise, names given to districts on the quiet residential slopes above the town's big and frequent festivities. Here the best houses look down on cerulean water extending far off through a gap of spray between the Heads into the Indian Ocean. Some include a panoramic view of the great Outeniqua mountains to the north.

Knysna's atmosphere is one of ease, of unwinding, of not rushing for an appointment, as in Ireland before the Celtic Tiger sprang.

An artist with a long grey ponytail from the 1960s may turn up as a born again plumber to fix your leaking tap or install a Jacuzzi.

The ethnic ceramic fireplace we have in our house was hand-painted by a woman who lives in the depths of a forest.

Good doctors and consultants, escaping from the fearfulness of Johannesburg, have settled in Knysna with their kids. There are two hospitals, one beside a retirement village with a view of Paradise.

Doctors make house calls, and charge about €20 for an appointment that's easy to obtain. European patients come to South Africa for prompt major surgery at an affordable price.

Most appealing to those who would love to have a small boat moored to a wooden jetty a few yards from the back door of a house finished to the standard of a five star hotel are the houses and sites in a thoroughly secure gated community on fashionable Thesen Islands in the lagoon. No problem in leaving a house unoccupied for most of the year.

The design of these buildings (white New England clapboard exteriors) is controlled by architects for everyone's benefit.

It takes less than an hour to walk around Leisure Isle, surrounded by the lagoon and connected by a causeway to a road close to the Heads. Cars give way to pedestrians who greet you amiably when passing on the level road.

The island is rich in trees planted long ago when the houses were built, each to a different design.

One resident is a retired BA pilot. No flats may be built above three storeys, enough for a penthouse to have commanding views.

Golfers may like to know that high up close to the Heads are two world-class golf estates, Pezula and Sparrebosch, still undergoing development that will put them on a par with the K-Club.

The Pezula Club has a gym and a rim-flow pool with rainwater showers.

Some houses on the Heads are luxurious enough to equal in status, and surpass in views, a house costing 10 times as much on the hill above Dalkey.

Let me end at Paquitas, our favourite old pub, built of logs upon rocks with decks straddling the shore of the channel between the Heads.

To sit there with family or with a beautiful friend, watching the sun sinking behind the mountains turning the lagoon dark red, white sails flapping on a yacht returning under power to the waterfront, while waves from the Indian Ocean suck at the shingle and explode under our feet, is the best way I know of passing the time of an evening in Knysna.