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Connemara Trilogy #3
Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom
The triumphant conclusion to Tim Robinson's extraordinary Connemara trilogy, which Robert Macfarlane has called 'one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English'. Robinson writes about the people, places and history of south Connemara - one of Ireland's last Gaelic-speaking enclaves - with the encyclopaedic knowledge of a cartographer and the grace of a born writer. From the man who has been praised in the highest terms by Joseph O'Connor ('One of contemporary Ireland's finest literary stylists''), John Burnside ('one of the finest of contemporary prose stylists'), Fintan O'Toole ('Simply one of the best non-fiction prose writers currently at work') and Giles Foden ('an indubitable classic'), among many others, this is one of the publishing events of 2011 and the conclusion of one of the great literary projects of our time. 'He is that rarest of phenomena, a scientist and an artist, and his method is to combine scientific rigour with artistic reverie in a seamless blend that both informs and delights.' John Banville, Guardian 'A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past ... This perfectly pitched work opens readers up to the world around them' Sunday Times 'Will endure into the far future ... He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility' Colm Toibin, Sunday Business Post Books of the Year 'Robinson is a marvel ... the supreme practitioner of geo-graphy, the writing of places' Fintan O'Toole, Observer Books of the Year 'Anyone willing to get lost in this book will be left with indelible mental images of places they may never have visited but will now never forget' Dermot Bolger, Irish Mail on Sunday
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2011
7 people are currently reading
308 people want to read
About the author
Tim Robinson
126 books45 followersTimothy Robinson (1935 – 2020) was an English writer, artist and cartographer. A native of Yorkshire, Robinson studied maths at Cambridge and then worked for many years as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London, among other places. In 1972 he moved to the Aran Islands, and in 1984 he settled in Roundstone, Connemara. In 1986 his first book, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, was published to great acclaim. The second volume of Stones of Aran, subtitled Labyrinth, appeared in 1995. His last work was the Connemara trilogy. He died of Covid-19 in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 27, 2017
The Irish Language in Tim Robinson’s Connemara Trilogy
For the title of the last volume in his Connemara trilogy, Tim Robinson looked to Patrick Pearse and his dream of a “little Gaelic kingdom” nestling in the intricate coves and islands in the southern part of the region. Indeed, Galway County is still part of the Gaeltacht, the area of Ireland where Irish is used by the community on a daily basis. Irish is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, according to its Constitution (BBC, n.d). However, if the population of Ireland, as recorded by the census in 2016, is 4,761,865 (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2016, p. 8), only 1,761,420 people declare that they can speak Irish; of those, only 73,803 speak it daily outside the education system (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2017, p. 66). 9,445 of these speakers are in Galway County (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2017, p. 69). Regardless of all this, a study about attitudes towards the Irish language reveals that 64% of respondents “believe that Ireland would lose its identity without the Irish language” (Darmody and Daly, 2015, p. xi).
Pearse probably viewed his little Gaelic kingdom as a utopia in miniature, a sample of what the whole country could become after the Easter Rising in which he would subsequently take part. In practice, this core of Irishness, ravaged by poverty and emigration, was a bilingual region, English valued as linguistic capital enabling the young to do well when resettling in England, America or Australia. Even nowadays, Robinson (2007, p. 155) mentions the case of a headmistress in his place of residence, Roundstone, who was enduring the boycott of parents opposing the use of Irish as a language of instruction in her school. The Irish language can be for many a part of their national identity, whether they speak it or not; for others, its role is secondary and pragmatism wins the day.
So, how do foreign residents such as Tim Robinson, a Yorkshire man, approach their relationship with Irish, an official language they would not strictly need to conduct their day to day business, a language thus discarded by part of the Irish population but claimed especially as their own by others who do not even speak it? The nineteenth-century writer Dómhnall Ó Fotharta poetically described Irish as “the sweet lively tongue, the strong overflowing tongue, the noble high ancient tongue of our own ancestors” (Robinson, 2009, p.320). Tim Robinson explains that he does not allow his lack of conventional genetic credentials to deter him from learning, loving and owning the Irish language: “I don´t feel excluded, as English-born, even by those ´ancestors´, for to me ancestors are the former inhabitants of whatever ground I find myself inhabiting, and learning something of their language is part of my self-investment in that ground” (Robinson, 2009, pp. 320-321). For Robinson, his Irish language studies are part of the devotion he feels for Connemara, which is connected besides to his personal and professional life: here is his home and his publishing business, Folding Landscapes.
The Irish language is also essential for Robinson´s primary project, the creation of maps of the Connemara region. The Irish toponyms are almost physically interlinked with the places they give name to, often constituting their detailed descriptions or providing clues to what they used to look like in the distant past. On other occasions they allude to the myths and legends with which the indigenous population at the time attempted to explain striking anomalies in the terrain. An extreme example is the placename Muckanaghederdauhaulia. Robinson unpicks this to mean ´the hog-back between two arms of the sea´ (Robinson, 2012, p. 275). In fact, the anglicization of Irish toponyms, a sinister part of the colonization process, deprived them of their true nature, and they became meaningless, whimsical-looking words that appear neither English nor Irish: “Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off from a tree. And frequently the places too are degraded, left open to exploitation, for lack of a comprehensible name to point out their natures or recall their histories” (Robinson, 2007, p. 81).
As Robinson travels the land on foot, by bike or extracting lifts from friends and like-minded people, we see him chatting in English or Irish with parties of pilgrims or archaeologists, with residents he questions about placenames or holy wells in their area, with men who row him from island to island. The trilogy is permeated with the gratitude he feels for the welcome of the people of Connemara, who correspond with him about obscure stories and offer cups of tea when he knocks, drenched, on their front door, a traveller like of the olden days. This must have developed in him a strong sense of belonging, making all the more painful the occasional hostility he encounters on the road. Robinson recalls, in that sense, an experience he had in the 1980s when exploring Connemara for the first time. He greeted a lady who was working in her garden, in Irish, but she noticed his English accent and “turned away grumpily, saying, ´We got rid of the Protestants a long time ago´” (Robinson, 2012, p. 130). This animosity clearly has stayed in his mind for a long time, and reveals that English people might come across prejudice even when they are so integrated that they have learnt to speak Irish. A shared language does not always ensure communication: accent and/or culture can sometimes come in the way, creating conditions in which one of the interlocutors may not desire to interact at all: in this case, the legacy of colonization appeared to be still part of the local culture. Robinson digs deep into this local culture in that chapter of his book, researching the history of religious conflict, in the specific area, that lies beneath the negative reaction of the lady he greeted.
Although Robinson claims not to be a linguist, he has such an affinity with the Irish language, and such a deep knowledge of its culture, that he is able to speak about it in an almost philosophical way. Towards the end of his project, he selects two words that hold special meaning, acting in a way as metaphors of the key elements in Irish culture: sean (´old´) and siar (´westwards or backwards in time or space´) (Robinson, 2012, p. 380). They are also the pillars of his trilogy, where he recounts for his readers the history of the landlord families, the geological movements that occurred in Ireland at inconceivably ancient periods of time, or the feats of the early Christian saints that take on a veneer of mythical heroes. In this journey backwards, there is a plenty of occasion for retelling the stories of many Irish language writers, teachers, singers, activists and enthusiasts. They are brought together by Robinson as a committed community reaching out to one another even across the centuries, gathered like those who visited the grave of the traditional singer Joe Éinniú (or Joe Heaney) in 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of his death (Robinson, 2012, pp. 128-129).
Despite all this, Robinson might be pleased to hear that, as an Irish language learner, he is not representative of things old, not in the least. In fact, it turns out that, as indicated by John Walsh and Bernardette O´Rourke (2017), “there are now more new speakers of Irish than native speakers”. These experts look outside the Gaeltacht for the future of the Irish language, towards the rest of Ireland, the United States and international online communities (Walsh and O’Rourke, 2017). After all, when people choose to study a language, to become their votaries (Robinson, 2009, p. 324), they develop a form of belonging beyond ancestry or national politics.
References:
BBC (n.d.) Languages across Europe: Ireland [Online]. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/europe... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
Darmody, M. and Daly, T. (2015) Attitudes towards the Irish Language on the Island of Ireland [Online]. Available at https://www.esri.ie/pubs/BKMNEXT294_V... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
Central Statistics Office, Ireland (2017) Census 2016 Summary Results – Part 1 [Online]. Available at http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/news... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
Robinson, T. (2007) Connemara: Listening to the Wind, London, Penguin Books
Robinson, T. (2009) Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness, London, Penguin Books
Robinson, T. (2012) Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, London, Penguin Books
Walsh, J. and O´Rourke, B. (2017) “Census show we must rethink our approach to Irish and the Gaeltacht”, The Irish Times, 7 April [Online]. Available at https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ce... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
For the title of the last volume in his Connemara trilogy, Tim Robinson looked to Patrick Pearse and his dream of a “little Gaelic kingdom” nestling in the intricate coves and islands in the southern part of the region. Indeed, Galway County is still part of the Gaeltacht, the area of Ireland where Irish is used by the community on a daily basis. Irish is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, according to its Constitution (BBC, n.d). However, if the population of Ireland, as recorded by the census in 2016, is 4,761,865 (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2016, p. 8), only 1,761,420 people declare that they can speak Irish; of those, only 73,803 speak it daily outside the education system (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2017, p. 66). 9,445 of these speakers are in Galway County (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2017, p. 69). Regardless of all this, a study about attitudes towards the Irish language reveals that 64% of respondents “believe that Ireland would lose its identity without the Irish language” (Darmody and Daly, 2015, p. xi).
Pearse probably viewed his little Gaelic kingdom as a utopia in miniature, a sample of what the whole country could become after the Easter Rising in which he would subsequently take part. In practice, this core of Irishness, ravaged by poverty and emigration, was a bilingual region, English valued as linguistic capital enabling the young to do well when resettling in England, America or Australia. Even nowadays, Robinson (2007, p. 155) mentions the case of a headmistress in his place of residence, Roundstone, who was enduring the boycott of parents opposing the use of Irish as a language of instruction in her school. The Irish language can be for many a part of their national identity, whether they speak it or not; for others, its role is secondary and pragmatism wins the day.
So, how do foreign residents such as Tim Robinson, a Yorkshire man, approach their relationship with Irish, an official language they would not strictly need to conduct their day to day business, a language thus discarded by part of the Irish population but claimed especially as their own by others who do not even speak it? The nineteenth-century writer Dómhnall Ó Fotharta poetically described Irish as “the sweet lively tongue, the strong overflowing tongue, the noble high ancient tongue of our own ancestors” (Robinson, 2009, p.320). Tim Robinson explains that he does not allow his lack of conventional genetic credentials to deter him from learning, loving and owning the Irish language: “I don´t feel excluded, as English-born, even by those ´ancestors´, for to me ancestors are the former inhabitants of whatever ground I find myself inhabiting, and learning something of their language is part of my self-investment in that ground” (Robinson, 2009, pp. 320-321). For Robinson, his Irish language studies are part of the devotion he feels for Connemara, which is connected besides to his personal and professional life: here is his home and his publishing business, Folding Landscapes.
The Irish language is also essential for Robinson´s primary project, the creation of maps of the Connemara region. The Irish toponyms are almost physically interlinked with the places they give name to, often constituting their detailed descriptions or providing clues to what they used to look like in the distant past. On other occasions they allude to the myths and legends with which the indigenous population at the time attempted to explain striking anomalies in the terrain. An extreme example is the placename Muckanaghederdauhaulia. Robinson unpicks this to mean ´the hog-back between two arms of the sea´ (Robinson, 2012, p. 275). In fact, the anglicization of Irish toponyms, a sinister part of the colonization process, deprived them of their true nature, and they became meaningless, whimsical-looking words that appear neither English nor Irish: “Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off from a tree. And frequently the places too are degraded, left open to exploitation, for lack of a comprehensible name to point out their natures or recall their histories” (Robinson, 2007, p. 81).
As Robinson travels the land on foot, by bike or extracting lifts from friends and like-minded people, we see him chatting in English or Irish with parties of pilgrims or archaeologists, with residents he questions about placenames or holy wells in their area, with men who row him from island to island. The trilogy is permeated with the gratitude he feels for the welcome of the people of Connemara, who correspond with him about obscure stories and offer cups of tea when he knocks, drenched, on their front door, a traveller like of the olden days. This must have developed in him a strong sense of belonging, making all the more painful the occasional hostility he encounters on the road. Robinson recalls, in that sense, an experience he had in the 1980s when exploring Connemara for the first time. He greeted a lady who was working in her garden, in Irish, but she noticed his English accent and “turned away grumpily, saying, ´We got rid of the Protestants a long time ago´” (Robinson, 2012, p. 130). This animosity clearly has stayed in his mind for a long time, and reveals that English people might come across prejudice even when they are so integrated that they have learnt to speak Irish. A shared language does not always ensure communication: accent and/or culture can sometimes come in the way, creating conditions in which one of the interlocutors may not desire to interact at all: in this case, the legacy of colonization appeared to be still part of the local culture. Robinson digs deep into this local culture in that chapter of his book, researching the history of religious conflict, in the specific area, that lies beneath the negative reaction of the lady he greeted.
Although Robinson claims not to be a linguist, he has such an affinity with the Irish language, and such a deep knowledge of its culture, that he is able to speak about it in an almost philosophical way. Towards the end of his project, he selects two words that hold special meaning, acting in a way as metaphors of the key elements in Irish culture: sean (´old´) and siar (´westwards or backwards in time or space´) (Robinson, 2012, p. 380). They are also the pillars of his trilogy, where he recounts for his readers the history of the landlord families, the geological movements that occurred in Ireland at inconceivably ancient periods of time, or the feats of the early Christian saints that take on a veneer of mythical heroes. In this journey backwards, there is a plenty of occasion for retelling the stories of many Irish language writers, teachers, singers, activists and enthusiasts. They are brought together by Robinson as a committed community reaching out to one another even across the centuries, gathered like those who visited the grave of the traditional singer Joe Éinniú (or Joe Heaney) in 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of his death (Robinson, 2012, pp. 128-129).
Despite all this, Robinson might be pleased to hear that, as an Irish language learner, he is not representative of things old, not in the least. In fact, it turns out that, as indicated by John Walsh and Bernardette O´Rourke (2017), “there are now more new speakers of Irish than native speakers”. These experts look outside the Gaeltacht for the future of the Irish language, towards the rest of Ireland, the United States and international online communities (Walsh and O’Rourke, 2017). After all, when people choose to study a language, to become their votaries (Robinson, 2009, p. 324), they develop a form of belonging beyond ancestry or national politics.
References:
BBC (n.d.) Languages across Europe: Ireland [Online]. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/europe... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
Darmody, M. and Daly, T. (2015) Attitudes towards the Irish Language on the Island of Ireland [Online]. Available at https://www.esri.ie/pubs/BKMNEXT294_V... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
Central Statistics Office, Ireland (2017) Census 2016 Summary Results – Part 1 [Online]. Available at http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/news... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
Robinson, T. (2007) Connemara: Listening to the Wind, London, Penguin Books
Robinson, T. (2009) Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness, London, Penguin Books
Robinson, T. (2012) Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, London, Penguin Books
Walsh, J. and O´Rourke, B. (2017) “Census show we must rethink our approach to Irish and the Gaeltacht”, The Irish Times, 7 April [Online]. Available at https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ce... (Accessed 23 November 2017)
September 22, 2025
a massive book, part of a 3 book series (!) on Connemara. I think for those who've visited the area it would be a better experience, as someone who hasn't I would have liked to have seen some images. Skippable in parts but some enjoyable stories and encounters. Doesn't entice me to visit the area but it's not meant to be a Tourism Ireland "wild Atlantic way" tourist book.
August 11, 2020
There's nothing quite like Tim Robinson's books about the land of Connemara and Aran. I read Stones of Aran/Pilgrimage decades ago and was spellbound by it, hated waiting so long for the followup to come out. Then I found his Connemara trilogy which is almost as good. I needed a change from all the serious things I was reading, and this is nostalgic and poetic and enjoyable. The land and people he wrote about is already partly gone - it seems that so many things disappear even while we're in the act of experiencing them and writing it down. He's rooted in Galway and Aran but I wish I could send him to Kerry to do his magic on the terrain my great-grandmother came from.
November 22, 2024
In the reading of this trilogy I've come to adore Robinson as another whose writing is a beautiful fusion of nature writing and human geography which results in a pure and loving expression of placeness - my favorite albeit murky subgenre.
Can't even pretend to be giving an unbiased account of this book on account of how much of a mark I am for it. This third and final installment came after Robinson had made a proper study of the Irish language, which he uses both interactively to collect a wide score of living stories and songs from various seanchaithe amongst the tangle of coastline and islands and scholastically to dive into layers of toponymy and history entangled with folktale - treasures aplenty for any gaeilgeoir.
It also doesn't help my case that the specific stretch of Connemara he goes through in this book includes the gaeltachtaí of Ros Muc where my Grandmother hailed from (ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-ainm) and An Cheathrú Rua, where I plan to study the language next summer. I would say I would probably find the unrelenting torrent of people and landmarks overwhelming or dry if I did not have a particular connection to this specific stretch of land, and even so I found myself often disoriented and jumping back to Robinson's map at the inside cover far too often. Another edition would perhaps benefit from more detailed maps for each chapter depicting the area addressed in them. I certainly plan to return to these once I have gone and done some walking in the footsteps of this kindred wanderer and seen some of what he has written about for myself.
Despite my complete lack of objectivity above expressed I think Robinson is an incredible author for anyone interested in a meditation on locale and home. The author and cartographer sadly passed away from Covid-19 in 2020 and I will thus regrettably not bump into him ambling around the rocks, hills and bogs of Roundstone or elsewhere in Connemara. I thank him for his words and maps.
"This conceptual Ride of the Púca is as much as I can offer to justify my work, as a citizen of troubled times."
Can't even pretend to be giving an unbiased account of this book on account of how much of a mark I am for it. This third and final installment came after Robinson had made a proper study of the Irish language, which he uses both interactively to collect a wide score of living stories and songs from various seanchaithe amongst the tangle of coastline and islands and scholastically to dive into layers of toponymy and history entangled with folktale - treasures aplenty for any gaeilgeoir.
It also doesn't help my case that the specific stretch of Connemara he goes through in this book includes the gaeltachtaí of Ros Muc where my Grandmother hailed from (ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-ainm) and An Cheathrú Rua, where I plan to study the language next summer. I would say I would probably find the unrelenting torrent of people and landmarks overwhelming or dry if I did not have a particular connection to this specific stretch of land, and even so I found myself often disoriented and jumping back to Robinson's map at the inside cover far too often. Another edition would perhaps benefit from more detailed maps for each chapter depicting the area addressed in them. I certainly plan to return to these once I have gone and done some walking in the footsteps of this kindred wanderer and seen some of what he has written about for myself.
Despite my complete lack of objectivity above expressed I think Robinson is an incredible author for anyone interested in a meditation on locale and home. The author and cartographer sadly passed away from Covid-19 in 2020 and I will thus regrettably not bump into him ambling around the rocks, hills and bogs of Roundstone or elsewhere in Connemara. I thank him for his words and maps.
"This conceptual Ride of the Púca is as much as I can offer to justify my work, as a citizen of troubled times."
July 17, 2023
This book is history and geography in a way that I've never seen presented before. Due to the small geographic scope, it manages to capture human stories better than any book I've read. As opposed to macro stories about great battles, instead it focuses on little skirmishes of 5 policemen on bicycles looking for someone in the bogs. One of the most interesting books I've ever read.
June 13, 2025
A very comprehensive written report of the landscape and way of life in Connemara. Tim Robinson leaves literally almost no stones unturned and no paths untrodden. Very dense and took me months to get through, but one of those books that you’re glad you read and have a newfound appreciation for once you’re done. Go raibh maith agat.
October 12, 2018
The second part of Tim Robinsons books on the topography, geology, and history of Connemara is fantastic. This part deals with the southern part and the islands in and around Rosmuc. Highly recommend it if you are looking for a better understanding of the area, the language and its people.
October 31, 2020
Astounding.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews