Ithell Colquhoun was a completely new name for me when I spotted this book on NetGalley recently, but I know now that she was a prominent British surrealist painter in the 1930-40s, as well as an occultist, poet and author of both fiction and non-fiction. The Crying of the Wind, originally published in 1955, describes her travels around Ireland and her impressions of the people she meets and places she visits. It’s the first of three travel books she wrote, with a book on Cornwall following in 1957 and then one on Egypt which has never been published.

Colquhoun bases herself near the village of Lucan on the River Liffey, to the west of Dublin. In each chapter, she sets out on a walk or an excursion by car to visit different parts of Ireland, including Glendalough, Connemara and Cashel. The structure seems a bit haphazard, with no real order or pattern to the places she visits, and the book definitely has the feel of a personal journal rather than something you could use to plan out your own travels. It’s an interesting book, though, and I did enjoy reading it. The descriptive writing is beautiful at times, as you would expect from a book written by a painter; here she describes the approach to Connemara’s Twelve Bens mountain range:

"Across miles of mulberrydark bogland we drove towards them, the tawny of king ferns lining the ditches that bordered the road. Air of a wonderful transparency arched above us, blue washed with white gold. I did not regret our slow pace, enforced by the pot-holes in the road, since I could watch the mountains from gradually shifting angles."

Although Colquhoun includes some anecdotes about her encounters with Irish people, the way they live and the conversations she has with them, the main focus of her writing is on the beauty of the natural environment and on places of historical interest such as old churches, holy wells and remains of ancient forts and towers. She often laments the rate of progress and its effect on the natural world; when walking in the countryside, she is very aware of the noise of traffic on busy roads nearby and the sights of new housing developments and factory chimneys altering the landscape forever.

With her interest in the occult, Colquhoun spends a lot of time discussing the myths, legends and folklore of each place she visits. She believes in ghosts, spirits and supernatural beings and accepts their existence in a very matter-of-fact way:

"Their forms vary; a friend described one she had seen on some downs in Dorsetshire as being ‘the size of a haystack, opaque but fluid at the edges, moving very quickly’; another is sometimes seen like a tower racing over wide sands on the north coast of Cornwall. I have myself seen in Cornwall one like a massive pillar of unknown substance, with filaments stretched from the top seemingly to hold it to the ground like the guy-ropes of a tent."

The Crying of the Wind is an unusual travel book, then, and also a fascinating one. I’ll look forward to reading her Cornwall book, The Living Stones, which is also available in a new edition from Pushkin Press.

This mystical, down to earth book of small personal experiences of travelling through Ireland is an ethereal delight.

While she makes the magic of the landscape sing with a folkloric tune, Ithell Colquhoun's honest depictions of the Irish people she meets along the way sing out loud into the wild green winds. Then they return from the mist shrouded islands on the edge of the Atlantic, to tell their own tales of history, culture, natural legends and real hard life in '50's Ireland.

Her travelogue's honesty and authenticity lies in small moments of travelling by public transport or lifts with friends, of time being unimportant, while the importance is placed upon just being, drawing, bathing in the sea, walking, wandering, staying up to the early hours and dealing with damp bedding.

She describes through the senses, so you are not just reading about the landscape and scenes she happens upon or creates, you are travelling back in time and becoming a part of the fleeting times & changing landscape itself; seeing behind the religion, the mountains & the wind, into her heart; Ithell's and Ireland's.

Thanks to @netgalley & @pushkin_press for the eARC for my review.