Tim Robinson

Connemara (Cunnemara is a variant spelling) is the most western district of County Galway. The vast estate (196,540 acres) of Thomas Barnewell Martin was the largest in the district. After the famine it was bankrupt and put up for sale by mortagagees, the London Law Life Insurance Society. Thomas Colville Scott was sent to survey the property in 1853. This is his journal.

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 territory: 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.

The Aran Islands lie off the coast of County Galway. This book is the second volume of a lyrical tour of the history and description of the largest island, Inishmore, Aran, or Árainn (its Irish name).

In an Irish graveyard, the corpses are distracted by local jealousies and petty disputes assuming global importance. Their banter is full of news of above-ground happenings, received from the recently arrived. As we listen in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community, we learn that in the afterlife the same old life goes on beneath the sod.