Muddy water is swirling around my bed. It's 6 a.m. Half-thinking it's a nightmare, I stagger into my wellies and wade over to the lightswitch. There's no water running down the walls - the flood seems to be coming through the bottom of the gable wall, and it's getting higher every minute. Outside, it's dark and pouring with rain.
By torchlight, I can see a stream (which wasn't there the day before) running into the drainage ditch, a kind of moat, which has been dug around the cottage. The water must be just flowing into the bedroom between the stones in the wall. Following the stream back from the house, I cross the lane and walk 50 yards upstream. There, under brambles, I find the source of the flood - an old well is overflowing. After an hour of manic digging a new ditch to channel the water away from the walls, panic subsides and the whole thing starts to seem amusing. After all, I wanted country living - and what could be closer to nature than well water in your bedroom? This happened three months after I had bought a country retreat, a pre-Famine stone cottage, outside Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon. I've now had the cottage for one year, and I am still trying to keep nature - and water in particular - at bay.
But even biting midges, mouldy walls and leaking floors cannot spoil my dream of country life. As city life becomes more frenetic, pollution increases and tempers fray, I sit in traffic jams on my way to work, dreaming of stone walls, the house martens nesting in my barn and a future vegetable patch - not to mention peace, quiet and a calmer, kinder existence.
Occasionally, reality hits me: the daunting amount of work needed will take years to complete - though local friends with similar houses are a great source of advice and encouragement. On the one hand, the cottage is in good condition - the roof is intact and the walls are sound. But, on the other, it needs a lot of work to make it comfortable, dry and winter-proof. Coming face-to-face with the realities of rural life is hard though: what do city-dwellers know about the "percolation area" needed around a septic tank, or about dealing with ancient household rubbish (of which there is an alarming amount)? There's so much I don't know - including the age of the cottage.
After being empty for two years, the house smelled derelict and the surveyor's description of excessive damp seemed like an understatement. "It will never dry out," I thought, "where is all the water coming from?"
The first step was the walls - to rip off the sodden wallpaper and hack out some of the wet mud between the stones. Then to open windows and light huge fires for weeks to dry out the remaining mud, which was holding up the walls. Now they have been "rendered" (which is like a cement, I'm told) and painted with limewash. Apparently, this is so they can "breathe" and, the theory goes, won't become so damp again. Water was, ostensibly, the purpose for the visit of two elderly ladies who appeared one afternoon through the blackberry bushes colonising the lane. They said they'd come to see the well, but showed more interest in questioning a friend of mine.
"Who owns the house? Where is she from? What are you doing here? What are you doing to the house?" Before he had a chance to ask any questions of his own, they hurried off. "Come on," said one lady to the other, "we've got all the information we need." I spent the winter abroad, leaving the windows open so the house could "breathe", and returned this spring to find it was drier than last year but that it had been taken over by animals - rats had dug tunnels between the rooms and were living in the attic, birds flew in and out, there was a beehive in the walls and strange footprints on the bed and windows (a fox? a badger?).
In March, I reclaimed the house (apart from the occasional robin fly-by) and approached the first big building job. To keep costs down, I am doing a lot of the work, with lots of help from friends. Although progress is slow, it is enjoyable (back-breaking, too) and provides time to get to know the house and land. The concrete floor, dotted with stone slabs, is leaking and has to be replaced. The problem, though, is that the cottage is tilting backwards so, to get a level floor, when we dig down six inches by the back door, we have to go down nine inches at the front door. After taking up the old concrete and rubble (which was recycled, filling the drainage ditches), the floor was pale mud, with the occasional puddle. This has gradually dried out and next week, will see the first major milestone: after a month of walking on mud and rubble, new concrete will be laid.
Restoring an old house feels like a little like archaeology, unearthing layers of the past and imagining how people used to live. We ripped out a modern red-brick fireplace in the livingroom and revealed an old stone fireplace, complete with the metal bar for hanging cooking pots on. A local man couldn't hide his amazement at our efforts: "So you took out the good fireplace and now you have this old one which doesn't draw."
Behind the wallpaper, we discovered recesses going deep between the stones - to keep food in, maybe? And why did somebody paint round river stones light blue and place them around the land? In the nettle-covered mounds dotted around the half-acre I found broken glass and old bottles (going back to the 1940s), men's boots, rusty cans, women's tights and old magazines. Now this rubbish joins my own huge mounds of excess rubble and mud from the walls and floor. Water isn't the only natural problem. The clouds of midges which descended at the start of summer made outside work impossible. The misery of hordes of midges biting all exposed areas, crawling into my mouth and eyes, made me seriously consider selling up. Afer all, what good is nature, if you can't go out into it?
And the sunny weather, although wonderful, has created a jungle - grass, brambles, reeds and nettles are taking over the garden. (The only things not growing are the herb seeds I planted.) One solution is to get an edible lawnmower. A goat or geese, for instance, would eat the grass during the summer.
Many of us "blow-ins" keep small animals destined for the freezer: I recently bought a piglet, called Barbecue, and a book on self-sufficiency. Killing sounds terribly messy - I don't imagine he's going to live up to his name and will probably die of old age.
Every caller makes the same two comments about the cottage: "It's got great potential," followed by: "I don't envy you". But while there are plenty of visitors in the summer, the charms of the countryside in winter are less obvious. I know my summer guests will prefer to stay in their centrally-heated, dry, urban houses and leave me alone to plan mammoth task number two: how to restore the old ruined cottage which stands behind my "newer" pre-famine home.
