Somerville and Ross were busy professional writers apart from their novels and stories, capable of turning out a competent travelogue or a well-written article on a variety of subjects. This rather slight work is now over a century old - it was written originally as a series of articles for the Ladies' Pictorial and was published in book form in 1893. Journalism in the Nineties was whimsical and fond of "native" accents rendered in queer phonetic spelling, and the writing partners did not disappoint their readers. Connemara a century ago was, of course, a very primitive place, but while Synge in The Aran Islands made this a positive quality, Somerville and Ross stop at the level of minor, cosy belles lettres. There is a foreword by William Trevor.