CS Lewis
College and Homecoming
Lewis secured a scholarship at Oxford as a student. For most people, this is where the trail of Lewis's Ireland ends, but as deeply as Lewis loved his Oxford life where he became a professor, he was a Co. Down man at heart. His idea of heaven was Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of County Down.
'I yearn to see Co. Down in the snow, one almost expects to see march of dwarfs dashing past. How I long to break into a world where such things were true.'
Lewis came back every year to explore our hills and seascapes.
'I have no patriotic feeling for anything in England…but as to Ireland, no-one loves the Hills of Down (or Donegal) more than I.'
However, Lewis was less happy with some Ulster people - specifically, Orangemen. In a letter to his best friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis wrote:
'The country is very beautiful and if only I could deport the Ulstermen and fill their land with a populace of my own choosing, I should ask for no better place to live in.'
So Lewis did exactly this in his Narnian stories - he idealised the Northern Irish landscape, removed the native population and filled it with fabulous creatures from his imagination.
