Michael Keegan-Dolan

His house stands on a site saturated in ancient magic, atop a hill aligned to the positions of the morning sun and waning moon. A megalithic barrow tomb, long famed for ghostly activity, shares the windy crest. Many would say this is the perfect location to find Michael Keegan-Dolan, a man intensely attuned to the dark side of nature. From this eminence he can gaze over the rolling Irish countryside beneath him: a three hundred and sixty degree panorama that encompasses Ardagh and Ballynacarrgy and the green infinity of the horizons.

The house, built as a school in 1830, has walls made from local stone, a concrete extension, no running water and no roof. It looks like a ruined cathedral in miniature and the whole location has the crackling magnetism of a place where ley lines cross and weird things happen. Keegan-Dolan arrives on foot in work clothes spattered with mud. He emanates unfettered enthusiasm as he steers me around the piles of stones, sand and tiles on the site. Paragraphs of information pour out of him in an articulate torrent of rural lore, astronomy and geology. I find his feral joy contagious but perceive that others might find it intimidating. What is irrefutable ...