 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.
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'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.
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Introduction
