The woods are indeed "lovely, dark and deep" around Inistioge, Co Kilkenny, and the ancient village itself, nestling on the banks of the River Nore, is a delightful, almost timeless place.
But the Celtic Tiger, in the form of profit-hungry development interests, is prowling around this idyllic spot, pouncing on vulnerable parts of it, pushing for the construction of lucrative apartments and holiday homes, presumably for Dubliners looking for a country bolt-hole and maybe even for people from overseas.
Can Inistioge's unspoilt and harmonious ambience withstand the enormous market-place pressures that have transformed and despoiled hundreds of other small rural settlements? Three determined women are leading a spirited rearguard campaign to preserve the character of their village. Brenda Stewart, Sile Hoey and Belinda Dyer are the joint honorary secretaries of the Inistioge Conservation Society, a watchdog group attempting to fight off insensitive change.
Last week, in a letter to The Kilkenny People they appealed to Kilkenny County Council planners to put a stop to the development juggernaut and help to save Inistioge from becoming "a weekenders' paradise and a weekday ghost village".
They warned that outside business interests were threatening to push out local residents to make way for a new breed of weekend holiday-makers, and that the village could lose the unique quality of a residential rural community.
They are acutely aware that for every foothold gained by the brash new development ethos, a part of the old village and its precious heritage will be eliminated permanently. "You can't go back once it's done," said Ms Hoey.
As the three women point out, when business-oriented eyes perceive Inistioge they see £signs everywhere.
The women have already taken the battle on several planning issues to the appeal stage - "But there are just too many things happening here now. We can't fight every one of them individually and keep going to An Bord Pleanala."
The trio and their group have to contend not only with the pressures of development and business interests seeking to move on Inistioge but with the ostensibly well-meaning efforts of the county council and FAS to "tidy up" the village and make it uniformly and artificially "pretty".
"Everything that looks a bit countrified is made to look suburban - the effect is to make things prim to the point of artificiality," says Belinda. "This awful striving for regimentation, giving everything a quality of sameness, is here."
"FAS has gone berserk on the place, " declares Sile. "It's not their fault - they're just told to go ahead and they go. But we're in danger of having another Adare on our hands, which is a very nice place, but really it's overdone, isn't it?"
Brenda thinks the entire village should have a blanket Preservation Order placed on it. But it is difficult to prevent the encroachment of small, but significant changes such as the "manicuring" of natural wild riverbank vegetation and the unannounced erection of "helpful" signboards for tourists.
The unique village has been a location for parts of two films - Hugh Leonard's Widow's Peak and Maeve Binchy's Circle of Friends. Now a massive sign on the outskirts welcomes visitors to Inistioge as a "film village".
Local conservationists consider this council-constructed advertisement to be gross and cheap-looking. While it may be of interest to visitors that the village has served as a film set, "you don't have to hit people in the face with it," they say.
The village has a charming, grassy square lined with lime trees. But already a tree in one corner has been lost - a victim the women feel, of a perception that the corner needed to be rounded off to facilitate the increasingly heavy traffic which thunders over the 10-arch bridge and through the village.
Elegant willows have been cleared in places on the delightful, tree-lined Point Walk alongside the Nore. There are development pressures to knock old walls and clear age-old garden areas.
Inistioge is mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters and is rich in ancient and handsome structures - priories, castellated ruins, a motte, as well as the spacious amenity of the Woodstock demesne and arboretum nearby.
But its central appeal lies in the fact that it has retained its quiet charm and peacefulness. The fight is on to preserve that.
