A Little Gaelic Kingdom

A masterful meditation on Ireland's Connemara region and its natural and cultural geographies from "the Proust and Ruskin of modern place-writing" (Robert Macfarlane).The late Tim Robinson steals us away to the southern part of the Connemara region, to the hilly backroads, storied villages, and endless bogs and bays where the Irish language is everywhere alive and flowing through its distinctive places and people. And Robinson rapturously details them all: from tiny literary haven Ros Muc and its famed language keeper and revolutionary writer Patrick Pearse, to Mongan's Hotel bar in the Carna peninsula, where folklorist Sean Mac Giollarnath told tales, to Muckanaghederdauhaulia village, "the hog-back between two arms of the sea," where "brandy has been brewing for generations in these little farmhouses, potato plots, and nooks of the shoreline," Robinson brings this extraordinary place rapturously to life.Here, geography, history, and philosophy are one--and only fully apprehended on foot, in conversation, the most commonplace of anecdotes braided with transcendent meaning. Theory and life happen simultaneously in this kingdom, the relationship found and forged in the writing of it. Robinson's encyclopedic knowledge and innate humility and curiosity make for a singularly rich read, "resurrecting the ignored or forgotten from under our feet" (New York Review of Books).