Another Life: Seen across the mouth of Killary Harbour, Connemara still offers a profile as wild you could wish. From the saw-tooth peaks above Leenane, past Diamond Hill to the last Atlantic promontory beyond Renvyle, a panorama of rocky, peaty slopes keeps faith with one's romantic imagination: even at night, when a necklace of lights glitters above the bay, there's plenty of black mystery stepping back beneath the moon.
For Tim Robinson, too, the view from his armchair above Roundstone Pier, embracing as it does eight of the 12 highest summits of the Twelve Bens, is a promise that it's still worth going out for a walk in this exhilarating landscape, however besieged by human designs.
How he has walked these past three decades! Months tramping alone like a penitent outcast, mapping the fractured limestone of the Burren; years roaming the ecological, geological, folkloric mazes of Ireland's most iconic island for the two astonishing volumes of Stones of Aran. And now the years of bogstriding and ridgemounting that have gone into Connemara: Listening to the Wind, first volume of a promised trilogy.
To read Robinson is to realise how much time we waste locked up inside ourselves, and how little we actually see of the world we move through. In his mode of walking a landscape, one step would fill this column, so rich can be his discernment, divination - his "paranoia of place", as he puts it.
For all that has been written and painted of Connemara, it is now a virtually forgotten country, most of it lost, certainly, to the people crowding second homes into Roundstone and the peninsula's granite littoral.
"All year round," notes Robinson, "the sound of the rock-drill is heard in the land . . . A suburb without an urb is coming into existence, a centreless anywhereville," It is on his wildest walks - out on the Bens or at the centreless heart of Roundstone Bog - that we share his keenest joy ("that rather exciting ego-whiff of sweat and wilderness"). The bog exchanges Aran's stone-walled maze for that of the myriad lakes - "as if half a sky had been shredded and strewn across black earth." Many of the lakes are nameless on maps, or have names that locals frown to recall, very few having ever walked out to see them. Threading tracks made by otters and sheep, we are immersed in the mysteries of rare heathers, or led, perhaps, to strangely primal places, like the one which has "the skeleton of a horse reclining like an antique warrior on his tumulus". One's envy and empathy twine when he says: "I feel I have truly seen things as they are when I'm not there to see them."
As a fellow naturalist, I attend to his progress through the lichens of Derryclare Wood, say, or the glittering viscera of quartzite mountains. But it is also the weave of folklore that holds, and the doings of epic figures such as "Humanity Dick" Martin and Alexander Nimmo. For a Yorkshireman, Robinson makes a most persuasive post-modern seanchaí, his computer bulging with stories.
Among other books this autumn, Brackloon: the Story of an Irish Oakwood will appeal to anyone with an interest in the intricate cycles of forest life. It relates the natural and human history of a fragment of semi- natural woodland between Westport and Croagh Patrick that has become a national testbed of woodland restoration and ecological research.
Its author, Dr Deirdre Cunningham, currently Heritage Officer for Co Mayo, was one of the team from UCD's Forest Ecosystem Research Unit that has studied Brackloon from the soil to the topmost mossy twigs, meeting on the way 17 different mammals and 28 kinds of bird.
The book is an exceptionally attractive publication from COFORD (the National Council for Forest Research and Development, with wildlife and botanical watercolours by Vincent Coleman and photographs by Declan Greene.
A more recent English settler and rather less solitary walker than Tim Robinson is Geoff Hunt of Limerick city, whose countywide forays after birds, butterflies and dragonflies enriches his Limerick Nature Walks, a profusely illustrated guide funded and promoted by local development groups and edited by Julian Reynolds.
It describes 35 walks, from town-park strolls to serious mountain hikes, with information about the likely wildlife and the best time of year to look out for it. Its dispiriting injunction that "an adult must accompany children at all times" is, I suppose, a dire reflection of the times.
Connemara: Listening to the Wind is published by Penguin Ireland 25.99 hardback); Brackloon can be ordered from www.coford.ie 35 hardback).
Limerick Nature Walks can be ordered from www.ballyhouracountry.com or www.newcastlewestbookstore.com 20, paperback
