“Colquhoun has a very beguiling pen. . . To Irish landscapes she brings a painter’s eye, writing particularly   beautifully about skies, twilights, river valleys, sea-frayed coasts and the intensive atmosphere of remote places”   – Tatler

Into the world of 1950s Ireland-a lushly green, windswept landscape studded with holy wells and the decaying country houses of a vanished ruling class-arrives Ithell Colquhoun.

An occultist and a surrealist painter, Colquhoun’s travels around the island are guided by her artist’s eye and her feeling for the world beyond our own, as well as her spikily humorous view of the people she meets. We encounter faeries and pagan rituals, ruined churches and Celtic splendour, rowdy bohemians and Anglo-Irish landowners fallen on hard times, as the author carouses through Dublin and tramps the hills of Connemara in this classic travelogue.

Through her unique perceptions we discover a land that is fiercely alive and compelling. It is a place where the wind cries, the stones tell old tales and the mountains watch over the roads and those who travel on them. By intuiting the eerie magic of Ireland, Colquhoun casts her own spell. She offers up a land of myth and legend, stripped of its modern signs, at the same time offering herself to the reader in this portrait of the artist as a young woman.

Richly visual and full of sly wit, this is an account of Ireland as only Colquhoun could see it, a land where myth and magic meet wind and rain, and the song of the secret kingdom is heard on city streets.

“She is sensitive to the ways of wind and water, the flowers and birds and trees”   – Country Life

In the midst of the 2nd World War, surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun withdraws from London to Cornwall, searching for a studio and a refuge from the Blitz, as well as from a shattered marriage. So begins a profound and lifelong relationship with Britain’s westernmost county. It is a land of granite ridges and lush valleys, surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past makes contact with the present. There she finds a hut with no running water or electricity, and lovingly brings it to life, creating a haven for her creative pursuits, and slowly coming to think of these rivers, hills and caves, seen in every season, as her true home.

Drawn to the sacred and the beautiful, the wild and the weird, Colquhoun writes about Cornwall as a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore – and perhaps a place where everyday reality connects to the world beyond. In prose as gorgeously dreamlike as it is sharply witty, this inimitable artist gives us a travelogue deeply attuned to natural rhythms, local atmosphere and the eerie beauty of a place that is as much legend as it is water and rock.