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 earth- wonders’ (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.
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