Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness

Connemara Trilogy #2

by Tim Robinson

The first volume of Tim Robinson's Connemara trilogy, "Listening to the Wind", covered Robinson's home territory of Roundstone and environs. "The Last Pool of Darkness" moves into wilder the fjords, cliffs, hills and islands of north-west Connemara, a place that Wittgenstein, who lived on his own in a cottage there for a time, called 'the last pool of darkness in Europe'. Again, combining his polymathic knowledge of Connemara's natural history, human history, folklore and topography with his own unsurpassable artistry as a writer, Tim Robinson has produced another classic.

Genres: Ireland, Travel, Nature, Nonfiction, History, Geography, Literature

373 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2008

About the author

Timothy 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.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

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)

[Mark Schultz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Connemara: The last pool of darkness, by Tim Robinson, 2008. This is author Tim Robinson’s second book in his Connemara trilogy of natural history, geology, human history, language, and philosophy. It’s a wonderful work, full of anecdotes as well as deeper dives into human behavior and history; beautiful writing as well as wonderful connections to natural places and their lineage and legacy.

Reading these books of Robinson’s (who died in April this year of COVID-19, at age 80) is a commitment. Properly undertaken – taking the time, welcoming a slower pace, allowing the entrancement of good writing and exceptional detail to take you – they accomplish something special. Robinson invites the reader into a relationship with what he calls “deep places.” To Robinson, a “deep place” is a “historical and ongoing process, a slow event…” And he proceeds again with this book to ramble slowly across the landscape – this time hugging the Atlantic coast of northwest Connemara – detailing the natural and human history of the place.

It’s an amazing read. His chapter “The Kingdom of Manannan” is a particular masterpiece, in which he starts with an encounter with some Irish youngsters on the strand, goes into a fantastic, beautiful description of an oceanic life form called coccolithophores that is just incredible, and segues into stories of Manannan, the Irish god of the sea and a trickster. Then comes this bit of learning:

“Down at the water’s rippling fringes we gathered around a boulder draped in dripping seaweed on which brightly coloured winkles were slowly cruising to and fro licking up the surface film of bacteria, and listened to Cilian [an ecologist friend] proclaiming the priority and superior multiformity of marine life over terrestrial life. The genetic froth of evolution investing every possible habitat the sea offered eventually threw a splash of foam onto the shore, a few species, a few Venuses, from which all land-dwellers and their loves are derived. Thus only four phyla or major categories of many-celled animal species are represented on land, while there are about thirty-five phyla in the sea. Radial symmetry is unknown in terrestrial life forms, but there were several exemplars of it for Cilian to point out, stuck to the boulder at hand: beadlet anemones, plump blood-red sacks with one central aperture above, encircled by 200 or so short tentacles and necklaced with twenty-four blue spots – the beadlets only visible when the creature is under water and open, for when the tide withdraws it swallows its tentacles and purses itself up, perfectly justifying its Irish name bundun leice, arsehole of the rock.”

And it continues on from there. I read that passage and others in the book, and though not present physically, I was transported, engaged, living in that moment of reading something of what the participants experienced who were there.

In terms of the human presence on earth, I think I experienced something of what Robinson writes about when visiting my daughter’s in-laws, the Corrales-Torres family, in Amatlan, Morelos, Mexico. In that community, the acknowledged, ongoing history goes further back than the written word, as with the holy place called the Two Grandfathers, where two huge pillars of the mountains have fallen together in an inverted V above a small spring. And that living-history-in-place encompasses the written word, as Amatlan means the place of the amatl tree which was important to the Aztecs for the paper made from its bark. And it continues through colonization, with the mixture of Nahuat and Spanish place-names – of places whose history is still evolving. And with ancient belief – Amatlan, the home of Quetzalcoatl. And with modern history – Morelos the home state and source of the revolutionary leadership of Emiliano Zapata.

I think, in part, Robinson is writing, in his Connemara books, about what it means to be indigenous. To be rooted, and alive and evolving, striving to develop culture and do work that is faithful to the truth of the people and the land. I don’t know that he would have said it that way, and I may not have that right. But the questions what does it mean to be indigenous? What would it take for a people, a culture to evolve/develop in that direction? are in my mind as I read Robinson’s books about Ireland, as they are when I am in Amatlan, or listening to indigenous leaders like Roberto Nutlouis of the Black Mesa Water Coalition and the scholar and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, closer to home.

Great literature, I was taught, takes the particular and connects it to the universal. I would recommend Robinson’s books on Connemara to anyone, especially if the reader can enter into the pool of darkness, and explore at a distance, in a space of “silence, untimetabled hours and noncalendrical days.”

[Adrian Fingleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had heard a lot about the Tim Robinson trilogy about Connemara, so while it seems a bit unusual to start with the middle book of three, this was the only one available in the bookshop so I went with it. Ironically, the book starts with a description of the environs of the south side of Killary harbour, down to Rosroe, where I had walked in late 2019. So it meant more to me as a result. Ditto Letterfrack, and Kylemore abbey, both of which I had visited. And I had slogged up Diamond Hill , just outside Letterfrack, for the amazing views in all directions. So all those parts of the book really resonated with me.

The book is dense. It covers the minutiae of each locality he features, and in many cases goes back to the ice ages, ancient Irish mythology, then the 17th and 18th centuries up to the present day in many cases. So effectively the book is mainly history, mixed with ecology, social concerns and a bit of politics thrown in. I did enjoy it, but more as a sort of a source book than as an easy read, which it is not. And to be fair, my recent visit to a part of the area covered gave me a good head start. I doubt that I will go and read the other two books, because I don't feel that I need this depth of knowledge to enjoy this unique part of Ireland. But, if I do end up going down to this part of Ireland again anytime soon, I will certainly bring this book with me because I think it would very much enrich any visit.

[Doug Newdick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robinson's writing is a thing to behold - he is a great literary stylist. At his best his prose is beautiful, lightly linking the very particular and specific locales of Connemara to grander, wider themes. This is a detailed book about the local geography, geology and history of parts of Connemara (largely the north and west of Connemara), a famously remote and rugged part of Ireland. At times Robinson's writing leaves me breathless and amazed. The startling use of metaphor, his wit are unusual and fresh. If there is a weakness in this book it is that sometimes his dwelling on the minutiae can be overwhelming and even a little tedious. Luckily these episodes are few and far between. But for lovers of literary style, of deeply local writing, of nature writing he has few peers.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a well-written and deeply enjoyable series of descriptions of this fascinating part of Ireland!

[Gearóid O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent if at time overly verbose book and a great read for those who have an interest in the area.

[Sam Geraghty · Rating 5 out of 5]

More galloping around Connemara, here on the North West. Makes me look forward to my next visit in the New Year.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

if it is as good as Connemara 'Listening to the Wind' then it will be money well spent and many enjoyable hours to look forward too.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense info rich writing exposing underlying religious battlefields of the connemara through natural history.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all his books, I wish he would go down to Kerry and write about it in he same way. can't wait to read the third one in the set.