Sean was born in this traditional Irish farmhouse in a village in County Longford in 1921, where he remained into his twenties. He was an uncle many times over - one of his sisters bore eighteen children (sixteen survived) and another sister four. Work was hard to come by in Ireland and he left his large extended family in the late 1940s to find work in England.

By 1950 Sean had married and went on to have four children – two boys, two girls. The family lived in North London and for over thirty years he worked for British Rail. One of his many roles was the massively strenuous manual coupling of train carriages, something difficult to imagine now.

Nearly every year in the summer, on his own, he would visit his old family home and stay there for a few weeks, He’d cut the grass and fix what needed fixing, sit in the sun by day or by the fire in the evening and enjoy his period of simple solitude. As he grew older, Sean’s visits were a bit less frequent and the very last time he went there was in 2009, just a year before he died, aged 89.