Diving into darkness
Robert Macfarlane
CONNEMARA: THE LAST POOL OF DARKNESS by Tim Robinson Penguin, £20, pp. 359, ISBN 9781844881550 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In 1972 Tim Robinson — a Yorkshireman by birth, a Cambridge mathematician by training, and an artist by vocation — moved to live on Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands that lie off the Galway coast. His first winter there was hard and ominous: long nights, big storms, and a series of accidental deaths among the islanders, by falling or drowning. Enough to send anyone home. But Robinson stayed, and shortly afterwards began work on what is, to my mind, one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English.
He started to walk his island, obsessively and in all weathers, pacing off its coastline and traversing its interior. And as he walked he mapped: recording the location and lore of each bay, cliff, wall, house, field, grave and significant stone. As he walked he also talked: knocking on doors, conversing, enquiring about the origins of place-names, listening to stories. Eventually he wove his findings together into his magnificent Stones of Aran diptych: Pilgrimage (1986) and Labyrinth (1995), which together run to nearly 1,000 pages.
After years on Inis Mor, Robinson moved to the Irish mainland. There he mapped the Burren, that pewter-coloured expanse of surface limestone that rises in the west of County Clare. And then he turned his formidable attention to Connemara — thus completing what he has called ‘the ABC of earthwonders’ (Aran, Burren, Connemara). Two years ago the first volume of his Connemara trilogy appeared, Connemara: Listening to the Wind. Now comes the second, subtitled ‘The Last Pool of Darkness’.
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.
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. q
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