By Roy Foster
IN SOME WAYS Tim Robinson is a one-off: a polymathic Yorkshireman, trained in mathematics and art, who has written passionately about the appearance, history and atmosphere of the West of Ireland, where he lives. He immerses himself in everything: mythology, legend, holy wells, sea-creatures, bog-plants, the architectural detritus of past conquests, the re-establishment of the corncrake, the ecology of hill-farming, and above all the comings and goings of people. Nor does he shirk the contemporary: bungalow blight, the "gibbering-gables" architecture of cutesy Americana, the destruction of fragile local ecologies by agribusiness. At one point he prospects for a legendary "lake of sand" preserved in local lore, and finds it sunk in the middle of a golf-course.
This is his second volume exploring the idiosyncratic social history as well as the flora, fauna and geology of Connemara, the most westerly region of Connacht. Remnants of a local Catholic gentry culture as well as sea-hardened fishers and farmers, survived waves of incomers, all determined to make a living in one of the purest and loveliest landscapes in the world. We meet commercially-minded English Victorians (including the Twining tea family) and ex-imperial servants, French lobster-fishing entrepreneurs, radical organic farmers; but he also gives much space to the creative spirits drawn to Connemara by that same wish, including - improbably - Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Maybe Wittgenstein's Connemara sojourn is not so surprising, because the very fact of being on the outermost edge of Europe has from time to time projected the region into the crucible of modern thinking: as Robinson shows when he recreates Marconi's revolutionary 1907 wireless transmitting station, and reminds us that Alcock and Brown's record-breaking flight from Nova Scotia touched down nearby fifteen years later. At the same time, the subsistence-level poverty of farming patterns, and the exploitative land system, outlasted recurrent attempts at "improvement", and the bleak evidence of hunger and emigration is all around. Nor did the dark times end with national independence; poverty and disaster haunted the landscape in the 1920s and 1930s, and the terrible story of the exploitation of children condemned to the Christian Brothers' Industrial School in remote Letterfrack continued until much later. Robinson writes of this with passion and judiciousness.
Elsewhere an ironic humour breaks in - as when a farmer, determined to stop his researches on the foreshore (traditionally open to access in Ireland), finally pronounces "I think, just for the principle of the thing, you should fuck off my land." This detachment saves the book from whimsy, and a high style where the sentences sometimes wind on as lengthily and inexorably as a bog-road. But above all he retains a capacious sympathy for all the incomers and outgoers drawn to or expelled from this desolate and cruelly beautiful place. The last chapter nods to a great literary precedent, in delineating a long-postponed visit by boat to a lighthouse: but the author's boat bumps against a lost buoy, bearing the name "Robinson", which he takes as a sign to terminate a work "supersaturated with self-reference". He can be forgiven for it, and the envisaged third volume will complete an edifice as remarkable as any of those surveyed in this book.
Connemara: the Last Pool of Darkness by Tim Robinson
Penguin Ireland, £20
Leave a comment