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Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness

Diving into darkness

Tim Robinson
Penguin, 359pp, £20,

Robert Macfarlane

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness, by Tim Robinson

One particularly brilliant chapter concerns the artist, Dorothy Cross who swims most days in a cove and sea-cave below her house [near Mullaghglass]; she sometimes takes a can of sardines down into the depths of Killary Harbour to feed conger eels, black monsters as long as herself that come wavering out of holes.

Cross is one among many divers into darkness — metaphorical and actual — about whom Robinson writes. For this is unmistakably a bleak book, that considers the many black aspects of Connemara’s past: poverty, famine, violent death, exile and emigration, sectarian conflict. Robinson also reflects sadly on Connemara’s present economic and ecological problems: how, after ‘the unimaginable climb out of the common grave of the Famine’, the region has failed to renew its old ways of life, its language and skills, so that the young need not leave for the cities and the attempts to employ them here would not disfigure the countryside.

But Robinson is also alert to the dreams, mirth and optimism that Connemara has inspired: flashes against the gloom. His sense of the region is probably closest to that of Oliver St John Gogarty, who wrote of the fairy land of Connemara, at the extreme end of Europe, [where] incongruities flow together at last…[where] the sweet and the bitter are blended.

Robinson describes himself as an ‘obsessive topographer’. His 36-year obsession, expressed as books and maps, has transformed the way the mid-west of Ireland is imagined, studied and encountered. Save for Iain Sinclair’s writing on London and its fringes, I can think of no comparable literary work that engages with a landscape on such a scale, at such density and with such intelligence. The Aran books are now firmly acknowledged as classics (I’ve just written an introduction to Pilgrimage, for its reissue by the superb New York Review of Books Classics series), and I have little doubt that the Connemara trilogy will attract similar renown.