A Little Gaelic Kingdom

“Many landscape writers have striven to give their prose the characteristics of the terrain they are describing. Few have succeeded as fully as Tim Robinson.”

“A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past […] This perfectly pitched work opens readers up to the world around them.”

“Anyone willing to get lost in this book will be left with indelible mental images of places they may never have visited but will now never forget.”

“[Robinson’s] work is reminiscent of that of some early explorers and geographers in its painstaking exactitude. But instead of bringing back the record of a hitherto unknown terrain, he is resurrecting the ignored or forgotten from under our feet. He attends to wildflowers, heathers, pollens, and to phenomena ranging from the cemeteries of unbaptized babies to the mythology of hares. His scientific rigor is suffused by a marveling poetry.”

“Visitors to Connemara, that expanse of stony beauty in the west of Ireland, are often struck by its stillness. One of the most eloquent readers of that silence is the Yorkshire-born writer Robinson, whose new collection of essays succeeds in the difficult task of staying true to the verities of a place on to which so many fantasies have been projected. […] Robinson writes with lapidary precision about a landscape so frequently shrouded in cliché that its unmediated truths are often invisible.”