**In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer
Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape in
northern Ireland--weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting
of sea and shore into the region's mythologies.
**
From the northern fiord waters of Killary Harbour to the southern
sea-washed islands of Slyne Head, western Connemara awes with a rugged
landscape: sloping cliffs, towering mountains, and the ever-present
thudding of the Atlantic. And here, within the earth, resides the record
of the past; stones with ash-grey centers reveal volcanic episodes, a
series of mysteriously arranged quartz boulders reminds us of the
ancient secrets held in the soil, and a long-disappeared lake filled in
by sand lies beneath a golf course, waiting to be rediscovered.
Mapping more than geography, Tim Robinson charts Connemara's deep
relationship to those who have inhabited its surface. The Last Pool of
Darkness brims with tales of ghosts, centuries-old land disputes,
periods of religious and political upheavals, philosophers entranced by
the isolating landscape, poets, mathematicians, artists, fantastical
smugglers, the discovery of botanical rarities, trickster fairies, and
the delicate balance between humans and nature. Not merely a "certain
tract of the Earth's surface" but "an accumulation of connotations,"
Robinson's Connemara offers readers an opportunity to travel across
space and time.
A work of great precision and tenderness, The Last Pool of Darkness is
an enchanting addition to the Seedbank series and next chapter in "one
of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English"
(Robert Macfarlane).
