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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

The phrase is Wittgenstein’s, who in 1948 lived for several months in a cottage on the lip of Killary Harbour, in north-west Connemara. It was in that ascetic, westerly, ice-carved landscape that Wittgenstein found himself able to think, and while there he completed sections of his great last book, Philosophical Investigations. ‘I can only think clearly in the dark’, he observed, ‘and in Connemara I have found one of the last pools of darkness in Europe.’

Robinson takes Wittgenstein’s phrase as a sign beneath which to read Connemara: a landscape in which beauty and suffering wrap closely around one another, and in which geology and mythology fuse together as ‘systems of description of what can be seen in terms of what lies too deep to be seen’.

Each intricately structured chapter of the book begins in or at a specific Connemara place, before gyring off into history, metaphysics, politics, ecology, geology. Robinson weaves the stories and actions of smugglers, fabulists, priests, landowners, actors, farmers, fishermen, poets, herbalists, talkers, industrialists and entrepreneurs — the cast of people who comprise the alternative history of the region. He writes of Marconi, who established his first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission station on the edge of what is now Roundstone Bog; of the Cleggan fishing disaster of 1927, in which 16 men from a single small village were drowned by a storm that came upon them with murderous speed; of the Famine and its ‘persistent effects’ upon the landscape and human relations of the region; of the desperate history of the Letterfrack Industrial School, run by the Christian Brothers, where decades of physical punishment and sexual abuse of young boys took place, undenounced until recently.