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Connemara: a Little Gaelic Kingdom
Location(s): Connemara
Genre(s): Travelogue
Era(s): Modern
This is the final work in Tim Robinson’s Connemara trilogy, and completes his breathtakingly intricate journey through the Irish peninsula (the first two are: Listening to the Wind and The Last Pool of Darkness).
Connemara is not just a landscape but a densely populated world – a little Gaelic kingdom, full of people and their stories. Robinson tracks the land, travelling not simply overthe hills and across the bogs and along the cliffs, but also down into the culture of these places.
He encounters the fairy horde and hears a turf-cutter describe a fairy mass, the story arresting him “like a dispensation from the forced march of time”. He hears ghostly voices and sees a divinatory fish in the last well on the saints’ march: “I felt I had never come so close to magic.”
(The Independent)
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