‘There’s a savage beauty to the place’: the dark mystery of Ireland’s Connemara region

The setting for Kathleen MacMahon’s new novel, The Home Scar, is a haunting expanse of lakes, bogs, heathland and mountains in County Galway

It starts at the top of a mountain. Not the novel itself, but the idea for the novel. The mountain is Errisbeg, on the coast of Connemara in County Galway. It’s an ugly lump of a thing, pocked with prickly yellow gorse and patches of swampy bog, but the landscape it commands is magnificent. The face of the mountain looks directly down on the back-to-back beaches of Dog’s Bay and Gurteen Strand. To the east is the lovely village of Roundstone. The Ballyconeely and Erislannan peninsulas are to the north-west, and beyond them lie the beginnings of the Atlantic, dotted with small islands.

So far, so normal. It’s only when you turn away from the sea and cast your eye inland that things get a little strange. The view travels across an expanse of desolation that stretches as far as the Twelve Bens mountain range in the distance. Not a thing lies between, only bog and scrub and pockets of water and the shadows of clouds travelling over the land. There’s a savage beauty to the place, but there’s also the feeling of something missing. This is a landscape strangely bereft of trees.