An eighteen-year-old boy goes with his parents to the west coast of Ireland where, by chance, he witnesses terrorist gun-running activity. His father is involved with a local wildlife station where biologists are studying the causes of variations among birds. On the off-shore island where this research has centred, there are ruins of the cells in which hermits in the Dark Ages had come to live and survive. He returns to an English university where he has intended to study biology or literature but finds neither of these disciplines is much concerned with wider experience and returns to Ireland to try to discover - what those old hermits were looking for? On his first visit to Ireland he had fallen in love with the glimpse of a young girl who, it had seemed, might be involved with the gun-runners. When together they go to stay on the deserted island it becomes possible to imagine it as the mythical Garden of the Hesperides with its Tree of Life hung with golden apples.