The first volume of Tim Robinson's Connemara trilogy, Listening to the Wind, covered his home territory of Roundstone and environs. The Last Pool of Darkness moves into wilder country: the pristine fjords, sloping cliffs, and mysterious islands of northwestern Connemara, a place that Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived on his own in a cottage there for a time, called "the last pool of darkness in Europe." Mapping the geological and natural history of this extraordinary place in relation to tales of ghosts and fantastical smugglers, centuries-old land disputes and periods of religious and political upheaval, this extraordinary book is both "a masterpiece of travel and topographical writing and a miraculous, vivid and engrossing meditation on landscape and history and the sacred mood of places" (Colm Tóibín).