heather island

When stately Buck Mulligan stepped out of the pages of Joyce's Ulysses he was a character immortalised in a great work, but the flesh and blood person who inspired that character was, himself, a Renaissance man of no mean achievement. Oliver St. John Gogarty was an accomplished surgeon, a poet praised by no less a person than Yeats, and a wit who held court in true Oscar Wilde fashion at his homes in Dublin and in his beloved retreats at Renvyle House and Heather Island in Connemara.