The author who has put Connemara on the map

Author and artist Tim Robinson probably knows more about Connemara than any other living person – although that’s not a claim he’d make.

But having spent most of his life exploring the geography, placenames, history, folklore, flora and fauna of this part of Galway, both land and sea, and having just published his third book on Connemara, he has accumulated a vast array of knowledge on the area.

“As you dig deeper, you could probably write three books about any small place,” he says of the Connemara Trilogy project. “Places reveal more and the details grow in size as you study them.”

His first book, Connemara: Listening to the Wind focused on Roundstone and its environs. The second, Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness explored the area from Killary around the coast of Clifden, taking in various islands on the way.

This latest, Connemara: a Little Gaelic Kingdom focuses on the Gaeltacht area of South Connemara and in it, he links people and place in a way that appears seamless.

“I try to make the writing expressive of my own excitement about the place and the beauty of the place,” he explains.

Maybe it’s because Tim Robinson is not a formally trained historian, or a geographer, or a biologist that he is able to convey both the small detail and the big picture in his books. He also possesses a flawless eye for detail and the ability to realise the importance of the stories he has heard over the years.

Born in Yorkshire, he studied maths at Cambridge, after which he taught in Istanbul for three years, then worked as an artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London.

“A slight interest, started off by [the film] Man of Aran”, brought Tim and his wife Máiréad to the Aran Islands in 1972.

“It was so fascinating in so many aspects. The flora, the fauna, the folklore, the language . . .” he recalls.

“Not a great deal had been written about it, so a lay person like me could write about it. Then a local person suggested I should map it.”He did and later produced detailed maps of Connemara and the Burren, published by his own company, Folding Landscape, which won him widespread praise.

But, Tim who moved to Roundstone in 1984, describes cartography as “a detour in my life”.

“I produced three maps so I do not describe myself as a cartographer. I would describe myself as a writer and as a visual artist.”

His last map, of Connemara, was published in 1990 and since then he produced his acclaimed two-volume work, Stones of Aran. He has also written essays on a variety of places and cartography generally.“I had thought I’d come to the end of writing about Connemara, but then I started looking at place names that I had written on cards over the years,” he says of the Connemara Trilogy project.

The placenames had been collected for the maps, for which he recounted their details factually.

“But I realised that, with books, I could go in a literary direction,” he says of his decision to embark on this project.

The three books have probably taken about nine or 10 years to write, but “a lot of the material had been knocking about in my head”, he says.

Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom is the last to be written, although it’s actually the second part of the trilogy. That’s because it proved to be his greatest challenge.

The first book, on Roundstone and surrounding areas, he found easy to structure. The second, on the Atlantic coast, “and the community’s natural interface with the coast, composed itself”.

“But I didn’t know how to go about the middle bit, because of the topography of Rosmuc and Ceantar na nÓileán and the Carna Peninsula,” he says referring to the scattering of islands of South Connemara.

He eventually solved this by writing the book in three parts.“My starting point was with Pearse in Rosmuc, following the roads and houses there and writing about the various people who were influenced by him. And then I talk about Pearse’s opposites, namel