The four creatures, as disparate as the corners of a square, who live in this house spend most winter evenings symmetrically disposed about the small wood-burning stove that stands for our hearth. My wife Mairead and I occupy wing-chairs (I was intolerant of their bourgeois solidity when my parents bought them in the 1950s, but I appreciate their comfort now), hers facing a glass door into the conservatory that also functions as a front porch, and mine the window, its green-velvet curtains drawn against the north wind tonight, that looks out onto the quayside. The cat and the dog (a fluffy short-legged terrier about the size of the cat) curl up in baskets to right and left of the stove, showing no preferences between them; sometimes there is a little wrangling for the space between the legs of the stove, where the cat in particular relishes very high temperatures but the dog soon begins to pant and has to be ordered out to cool off.
This is our winter-room and library. It is about 12 feet square and disproportionately high, having a coved ceiling with a skylight in the north-east corner. Above the stove is a mantelpiece with a cloisonne vase, midnight blue and peach blossom, which I think must have come from my grandmother's antique shop, and a fake carriage clock that came free with a purchase from a mail-order catalogue. Between these hangs an oval rosewood mirror that from my chair shows a reflection of the skylight, empty black by night, or star-dotted or streaked with silvery rivulets of rain; as I begin to write this, on midwinter eve, the full moon appears in the mirror, stealing my warmth, instilling a Mallarmean chill. I have never seen the moon in this way before; it must be exceptionally high in the north-eastern sky. The papers say it is nearer the earth tonight than it has been for a century.
The library holds some few thousand books, none of much individual market value but collectively irreplaceable, the product of browsing in bookstalls and jumble sales. Those shelved on either side of the fireplace have been placed there for appearance; they have a bit of gilt or a pattern on the back, or pleasing titles like She Cometh Up As A Flower and She Might Have Been A Duchess, both from M's collection of 19th-century women's novels. In a recess to the left are "recent acquisitions", mostly bought from catalogues of remaindered books and astonishingly heterogeneous. Among them at the moment are The Distribution Of Prime Numbers, which will join a shelf of mathematics texts and popular science books once I have resigned myself to the fact that it is too advanced for me; a paperback of Cormac McCarthy's blood-boltered novel about the wolf, abandoned at the point where M could not bear to read on; and all the volumes except the last of Alexander Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica, a trophy of my recent visit to the Hebrides.
Over the window is a five-foot-long shelf with a slight sag in the middle; most of it is taken up by books of an environmentalist persuasion, and the rest by a collection of various editions of my own writings; I tend to glance up at this and worry that the row is not longer. The next wall, opposite the fireplace, is largely literature, and roughly in alphabetical order. A browser would soon notice that no women writers are represented, because they have all been commandeered by M for her feminist collection shelved on the fourth wall of the room; we sometimes discuss reintegration, but that would be a major ideological shift and a day's dusty work.
Leaving the warmth of the library to go to bed, we pass through a corner of the living-room next to it, which is enormous, impossible to heat for winter use, with wide windows along the north side and another in the eastern gable end, all giving onto the waters and farther shores of Roundstone Bay. We glance down its chilly perspective as we hurry through, or if the night is fine go to the gable window to admire the patterns of moon-ridden wavelets and listen to an oystercatcher'slonesome whistle flitting to and fro in the blackness. By day this room is entranced by its views; entertaining guests here on summer evenings we sometimes find that a companionable silence falls, all of us lapsing into reverie over the mountains'slow rebuilding of themselves out of dusk after having spent their substance in sparkles all day long. There are trays of seedlings on the wide windowledges and M's several fancy sorts of fuchsia in pots on the floor.
The furniture is heterogeneous and undistinguished, the ornaments are all accidental acquisitions given to us by visiting children or bought to fill an empty minute in a Clifden junkshop, but the general effect is spacious and pleasing, our forte as home-makers, we sometimes think, being the nice arrangement of the nasty. The room has three skylights and the same high board-lined ceiling as the library, which was evidently divided off from it by a thin partition wall at some stage.
A hundred years ago the whole chamber was one of the lace schools set up by the Congested Districts Board here and there throughout its poverty-stricken fiefdom under the charitable patronage of the viceroy's wife, Lady Aberdeen.
A young lady from Fermanagh, Margaret Cosgrove, came to teach the craft here, and married Richard O'Dowd, clerk to the landlord's agent, who had his office next door on the quayside; their descendants still own O'Dowd's, the summer visitors' favourite bar and restaurant, overlooking the harbour, and when we took over this building and began to rescue it from years of dereliction, one of them gave us a photograph of Margaret and her two sisters, also lace teachers, one employed in Ros Muc and other villages of Connemara and the other in Cliffony, Co Sligo, all three wearing wondrous evening gowns of their own creation.
That photograph hangs by the gable window of the big room, together with others relating to an earlier stage in its history when, according to the oldest resident of Roundstone, it was the ballroom of someone called "Sainty" Robinson, of whom she knew no more than his intriguing name. I was anxious to find out more of him, foreseeing that I will be conflated with him in folk memory if there still is such a thing in another century's time.
It seemed likely that he was a connection of George Robinson and his son, who were successively land agents for most of Connemara from the 1850s to the 1930s and lived in Letterdyfe House, just north of Roundstone. But I could establish nothing about him, until one evening there was a knock on our door, and an elderly gentleman of Edwardian mien greeted me with: "Mr Robinson? - I'm Robinson!" This Dr Philip Robinson of Dublin, who turned out to be descended from George Robinson, had heard tell that his forebear had been a harsh, evicting agent, and was calling on me as a local historian to find out if this was so. I took him down to the studio, opened my files and showed him the evidence that it was indeed so. Nevertheless we became fast friends, to the point that we found ourselves almost adopted into the posterity of the Letterdyfe Robinsons, and inheritors, after Dr Philip's death, of several memorabilia of the family. So it comes about that I can identify "Sainty" in a copy of the family tree as a St-John Robinson, one of George's younger sons, and that a pair of framed Victorian silhouettes of George and his wife, Rebecca, hang in Sainty's former ballroom. And once a year, on the day of Roundstone Regatta, we remind the room of its past, hold open house and drink to the dancers of old. While the traditional work boats, the Galway hookers, gather below our windows to race in the bay, an extraordinary mix of guests drops in for a lunch of courgette eggah and apple crumble, watch the events from our windows, go off to crew a boat or join the crowd of spectators on the quayside, and return for tea. Sometimes a visiting poet recites, musicians bring out their fiddles and flutes, ladies from the village dance a Connemara set; sometimes, when we sit down with a few lingering guests, the evening is mellow with wine and the last of the red-brown sails are ghosting home to the harbour through a pearly mist, there are moments in this room when time is perfectly content.
The rest of this level of our house is an extension to the back, probably added when the building became a knitting factory under the regime of a State development body, Gaeltarra Eireann, in the 1950s. First comes a space we have turned into a kitchen, originally an office separated from the big room by a glazed screen through which the supervisor used to keep an eye on her workforce, as several elderly ladies of the village well remember. From there a corridor leads back, with cookery and gardening books shelved on the left and, on the right, two windows onto a small rockery under a misshapen cypress that leans close to the house, called Crann na gCat, the cats' tree, because cats, our cat and her visitors, love to lie along its broad, comfortable branches. There are circular jumble-sale mirrors looking each way along this corridor; in fact the house has so many mirrors, glazed doors and windows that a diagram of how scraps of sky and garden are multiplied within it would look like that of an optical instrument. And as the sea surrounds us on the north and east, whatever light falls into the house from those quarters is accompanied - shadowed - by a thin, restless inverse of itself flung upwards onto ceilings.
AT the end the corridor turns left into the bedroom, from which a portion has been glassed off as M's room: her Italian books, the ironingboard, her desk, and in a drawer the backup copies of my writings, to be snatched to safety in the garden in case of fire. Our bed is very wide, on a low platform home-made out of planks and two-by-one timber; there is room for entwining and room for being untouched, surface area for books and breakfast tray, and for Squig the dog who sleeps nested against the curve of M's back; Nimma the cat sleeps in the library but sometimes joins us in the morning and curls up under my caressing hand while I read the paper. Lying in bed we are facing two windows and a glass-panelled door onto the garden; we watch the seasonal transformations of an ancient hawthorn tree against the minute-by-minute transformations of the sky. Morning sunlight beams in, glowing in the leaves and blossoms of geraniums on the window-ledges as in stained glass. One or two friends who know our late-morning ways sometimes follow the path round the house to the garden door, and if they find it, as is usual, wide open, come in to sit in chairs opposite us, as at a petit lever. All is luxe, calme et volupte, with a good deal of the often forgotten ingredient: ordre. Finally there is the bathroom: narrow, with two little square windows at the far end like picture frames holding trial pieces of the hour and its weather.
We are house-proud and garden-proud. First-time visitors would not know we had a garden other than the shady rockery under the cypress by the front door; in fact the topography would not seem to provide room for more. So if we want to amaze them we bring them through the house to the garden door, where it is as if space had suddenly sprouted a new dimension. A rather undulating and irregular lawn leads away down a long perspective between, on the left, a high, ragged, thunder-dark fuchsia hedge, and on the right a sequence of incidentals - paths curving out of sight between raised flower-beds, a garden hut overwhelmed by honeysuckle, a little sunset mountain range of hydrangeas, a grove of a dozen birch trees - that demand to be explored. We respond to that demand every day except when the rain is heavy; we carry our mugs of coffee around in a ritual that includes the animals, Squig bounding ahead and looking back with a ball in her mouth, Nimma sauntering after as if it were only by chance she had decided to look round the garden at the same time as us. We commend every blossom in its burgeoning and fall; we allow ourselves to be amazed again and again, like a child with a favourite story-book by the sequence of the seasons.
The paths are odd, being made of rectangular concrete blocks, which soon lose their harsh blue-grey tone and sharp edges as moss takes them in hand, and are easily dug up and reset when I decide to realign a path. These narrow ways fork and loop and duck under trees around a dozen little subsections of the garden in a romantic, even sentimental way, and then unexpectedly - even to us, who made all this - straighten themselves up into the perimeter of a slightly sunken square parterre, the centre of which is marked very formally by the slim vertical of a cordyline palm. This forum, as we call it, is surrounded by aspens and birches and larches, which screen it from the new holiday apartments overlooking us from inland but are slender enough to leave it sunny, and one can sit in still air here even when the rest of Connemara is hysterical with gales. Its area is divided up by a symmetrical pattern of 144 concrete blocks into 145 square plots of earth, 81 of them defined by the long edges of four blocks and 64 by short edges, the larger plots being regularly interspersed with the smaller ones. In the 32 plots nearest the edge, all the way round, we grow extravagant amounts of parsley from which once a year we make jamjarfuls of a sweet jelly called parsley honey, and in the others are chives, mint, blue corydalis, pink oxalis and so on, in an irrational and planless mixture. This numerological garden was a work I undertook at a time when I was spending long nerve-stretching hours every day dotting details onto my Connemara map with a magnifying glass; in the evenings I would restore a sense of scale to my muscles and bones by digging out barrowloads of earth and levering the heavy blocks into position with the back of a spade. It has settled itself comfortably into the ground, weather has gentled it and fern spores have discovered its crevices, so that it already looks as if it has been there for a hundred years. Walking across it, feeling the regularity it imposes on the step, reminds me of Aran's fissured limestone flags, and of the "wavy concrete floor", the unrealised project of my London days.
If every garden has a secret, that of our garden is the sea. Behind the fuchsia hedge the ground falls almost sheerly for 18 feet or so to the seashore. Gaps in the hedge give us irregular windows onto the waters of the bay, and when one of Roundstone's half-deckers goes by one hears waves on the rocks below discussing the event for some minutes afterwards. There is a little patio outside the garden door, and from a corner of this one can lean over a wooden rail and look along the cliff face, a tangle of brambles and nettles, with ledges settled by sea pink from nature below and montbretia from culture above.
The cliff meets the gable end of the house at an angle and seems to disappear; it is difficult to make out how it is folded into the structure of the building. This becomes clearer when one goes round to the other side, past the conservatory or front porch, where a broad flight of steps descends to a courtyard between our inland gable and the apartments next door. From here one can see that the nucleus of the building has two storeys and is built against the cliff; the upper storey with its old slate roof looks like a long cottage, and consists of our library and the big searoom, with the extension running back from it at cliff-top level. The lower storey also has an extension, to the front, at sea level. There is no interior communication between upstairs and downstairs. Above is our home, which we call Nimmo House after the Scots engineer who founded Roundstone in the 1820s, built the pier just outside the courtyard gate and may have had a store on this site; below is the premises of Folding Landscapes, publishers of maps, archivists of local lore, lookers-out at the sea. When we acquired the building in 1989 it had long been in use as a rubbish dump and store for a dreadful knitting factory next door, which had gone into bankruptcy and is now replaced by the holiday apartments. The front extension in particular was a concrete shell, a dismal clutter of windowless cells, brokendown garage doors, rusty boilers. Penetrating its filthy corridors we found at the back a huge room the low ceiling of which had partly collapsed onto the heaps of plastic bags, full of reject woollen socks, that almost filled it.
The rear wall of this dank cavern masks the cliff face. Nowadays Folding Landscapes is full of light that floods through many windows, interior openings and glass screens, but I am still aware of the cliff it is founded on, that has not been seen since Nimmo's time, or at least since the Robinsons of Letterdyfe had turf stores and sheds for carts and pony traps here, and I imagine it waiting, unresignedly, until we have all gone away.
Tim Robinson 2001
Biography
Tim Robinson was born in England in 1935 and has lived in the west of Ireland since 1972. He is the author of the best-selling two-volume Stones , and of Setting Foot `A House On A Small Cliff' appears in My Time In Space (£20), his new essay collection, published this week by The Lilliput Press.