Christmas at the House on an Irish Hillside

Author Felicity Hayes-McCoy invites the reader into her stone house at the end of Ireland€s Dingle Peninsula where candles shine in every window at Christmastime, welcoming the traveller home. The most frequent reader response to Felicity€s 2012 memoir The House on an Irish Hillside has been €˜I didn€t want it to end€. This little book draws readers back to the fire on the hearth, frosty walks on long beaches, and the enchantment of storytelling, music and good company at the most festive time of the year. It€s the perfect virtual Christmas card or stocking filler in which the power of Ireland€s myths and legends meets the power of the internet, and the water for the first cup of tea in the morning is still filtered through heather, black bog and fissured stone, straight from the mountain.

Felicity Hayes-McCoy was born in Dublin, Ireland, where she studied Irish and English language and literature at university before moving to London, England, in the 1970s to train as an actress. Her thirty year career as a writer spans broadcast and digital media, books and music theatre. She and her husband, opera director Wilf Judd, now live and work both in inner city London and at the western end of Ireland€s Dingle Peninsula. In her memoir The House on an Irish Hillside (Hodder & Stoughton 2012) she describes how finding and restoring their Irish house reintroduced her to a place and a way of life that she first fell in love with as a teenager, and to which she€d always known she€d return when the time was right. She is currently working on Enough Is Plenty, a lifestyle book illustrated with her own photographs, which will be published by The Collins Press in 2015.