On the moneyed roads where I grew up, there’s no longer room for the misfit, artist or strange old lady who made Ireland what it was

I walk the old terrain past flattened earth that I remember being dense with gorse and bracken. The foundations for identical luxury homes mark out the now dry soil, virgin territory waiting to be colonised. Every acre of this landscape with the potential to be developed is, it seems, already midbuild. On a mild, almost cloudless Sunday evening these sites of renovation and extension, featuring exposed timbers and half-finished brickwork, are demurely covered up under flapping tarpaulins.

On hushed and moneyed roads, where older properties rarely change hands, there are signs, too, of change. Yellow skips, filled with wood panelling, rolled-up carpet and aged bathroom suites, sit on the quiet pavements like marooned ships. On one of those skips I see a hostess trolley, upside down, legs in the air, exposed and abandoned, her castors broken and rusted, like ancient party shoes long beyond repair.

I must have spent a solid year of my early-1970s adolescence fantasising about having a hostess trolley of my very own. One to pile high with mushroom vol-au-vents and push towards a smattering of tinkly guests, each delicately arranged over my fabulous three-piece suite. Somehow, those gliding trolleys represented to me the height of luxury and inclusion.

As a young teenager I wanted to be the same as the other girls, their riding boots and sunshine holidays. The boho poverty in our rented cottage was not something I advertised

As a young teenager, recently having moved to this area, I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be the same as the other girls in the neighbourhood, with their riding boots and hacking jackets, their sunshine holidays and heated hair rollers. The boho poverty in our rented cottage, which sometimes made me feel ashamed, was not something I advertised.

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Within a year or so the trolley fantasy got subsumed by cider and cigarettes and boys on motorbikes with 10-spots in the pockets of their Wrangler jackets, and the glorious democracy of romance.

Walking these roads half a century later, it feels like those emulous ghosts are stirring. Much has changed in this place, but so much hasn’t. It is, as it always was, a theatre of opulence. There are a handful of ultramodern split-level renovations around now that weren’t there before—houses basking in sea light, whose long, unadorned windows follow the sun from east to west. But it is the older, impenetrable homes, with long views of the bay, houses crouching behind wrought-iron gates that close like wrinkled lids across pebbled drives, that remain the most desirable.

Money doesn’t always buy taste. Dotted among these discreet abodes are a scattering of noisy hacienda-style properties, watched over by a convocation of plaster eagles and replete with bouffant arches and demanding water features. A surprising variety of concrete birds of prey nest in this salubrious suburb, some adorning pairs of granite pillars, stern sentinels charged with admitting the family Range Rover and keeping out the hoi polloi, others spread-eagled over striped lawns and ornamental rockeries or perched atop bubbling fountains, some staring out dead-eyed from above splashy car ports.

Looking around this rarefied hinterland, it is impossible to imagine a family arriving here, as my parents and I did, all those decades ago, in a borrowed car, with what was left of our possessions after the bailiffs had cleared off, and finding a place to live

I don’t really know why people choose eagles to represent their dominion over their property, but it does seem to be the go-to raptor of choice. I suppose an eagle’s concrete wings, spread over the family pile, are somehow, despite the irony, symbolic of freedom. They’re a badge of prosperity, maybe, a didn’t-we-do-well? indicator of status, a reminder to keep off our patch.

Looking around this rarefied hinterland, it is impossible to imagine a family arriving here, as my parents and I did, all those decades ago, in a borrowed car, with what was left of our possessions after the bailiffs had cleared off, and finding a place to live. I can see no corner for the misfit, the artist, the eccentric, for the strange old ladies who lived down the lanes. I wonder where, if anywhere, in the whole of Ireland, they and their like might live instead, and what effect that exclusion has on the soul of a place.

I have a pal who believes that one day we will view landownership in the way we now view slavery, as a barbaric thing with no place in our culture. I am fascinated by her thinking; I just hope that the world stays alive long enough to test her theory.

I walk on, under the plaster beasts, finally climbing the low, barely inhabited mountain at the centre of the isthmus and emerging, finally, in the village. Where, in the pinkish late-evening light, screeching seagulls swoop to relieve the daytrippers of their vinegar-soaked chips.