Ireland: island of saints and scholars. Although in the interests of full disclosure not all of its 5 million inhabitants are necessarily either saintly or scholarly, the visitor to its shores will certainly find many footprints of Ireland’s tradition of folklore and stories. The island’s temperate climate is nourished by the Gulf Stream, turning the landscape into a lush green onto which are embedded imprints of Ireland’s cultural past, typified by the extraordinary Neolithic tomb at Newgrange.