This is from Tim Robinson's pungent and evocative introduction to a recent book Connemara After the Famine, the journal of a survey of the Martin estate made in 1853 by one Thomas Colville Scott. He, Robinson, that is, writes of human images from the journal: "One of these, both starkly elemental and richly individuated, is likely to haunt the readers' mind as the very personification of that inhabited desolation, Connemara after the Famine."
The surveyor's text runs . . . "an Irish curiosity, namely a Chimney sweep boy about ten years old, and three feet high; he had run away from his employer in the town of Galway, and had reached this out of the way spot, 60 miles distant, without a stitch of clothing, except a belt of sacking, about one foot in width, around his waist! When we met him, a thick shower of snow was falling, and he was running along with his hands over his shoulders and a little hoe under his arm. I stopped him and asked his history. He laughed and told me - adding that he had just swept the Priest's chimney, and was on his way to do the same good office at the Constabulary Barracks. I asked where he put his money, when he got it, and he said in his hand, but, said I, how will you do when it accumulates? "Oh," he replied, "I'll fall up on a plan when that occurs. Writes Robinson: "Surely this apparition is William Blake's chimney sweep, mysteriously transported from London:
. . . little black thing among the snow,
Crying `weep, weep' in notes of woe
- except that, in Connemara, he is laughing. Coiville Scott sensibly arranges to have him scrubbed and provided with a coat; and, in his journal, brings home to us that appalling laughter.
A paperback of about a hundred pages, with an excellent map of the surveyor's journey and notes and illustrations. Tim Robinson edited the journal as well as writing the introduction. Lilliput £5.99.