WHAT began more than 25 years ago as a modest walking guide for visitors has become a colourful 100-page book filled with maps, memories, mythology and the experiences of a self-described “Blow In”.
Brendan M. Rohan will launch Rambles and Ramblings of a Blow In at Dunfanaghy Workhouse tomorrow evening, Tuesday, at 5pm. Signed copies will be available during the event.
The book explores ten walks around Dún Fionnachaidh and An Craoslach, accompanied by new hand-drawn maps. Yet it is the “ramblings” between the rambles that have transformed the publication into something considerably more personal than a conventional tourist guide.
A guide born at Corcreggan Mill
Rohan wrote the first edition in 2000 while running the Corcreggan Mill accommodation business near Dún Fionnachaidh.
Its purpose was partly to help casual visitors experience more of the surrounding landscape. There was also a thoroughly practical commercial consideration: encouraging guests to discover enough to persuade them to remain for more than one night reduced the business’s laundry costs.
The original guide never extended beyond about 30 or 40 pages. Rohan updated and reprinted it in 2010, but his subsequent retirement through illness appeared to remove any practical need for another edition.
Nevertheless, he felt what he describes as a sense of duty to revisit the guide. He undertook additional research, produced new maps by hand and added two further walks to the original eight.
Then the project began to wander.
When the ramblings took over
Alongside the walking routes, Rohan included personal stories about the dreams, adventures and misadventures that can befall someone who has made a home in a place where he was not born.
Those anecdotes – his “ramblings” – are joined by observations on local life, mythology and philosophy, together with what the launch material candidly promises will be “a bit of controversy”.
The resulting publication surprised even its author.
“I was shocked to find that the result was a rather colourful 100-page book, which was never intended,” Rohan said.
The book is both a guide to the landscape and a salute to the area Rohan has called home for more than 35 years. It also reflects the complicated position of the long-established “Blow In”: someone who may have accumulated decades of local knowledge, friendship and experience without ever being considered entirely native.
Already provoking reactions
Rohan says the response has been both surprising and satisfying.
Persuaded
One reader reportedly told him that the book had persuaded his Portuguese wife to stop pressing for the sale of their local holiday home in favour of buying one in Portugal.
Meanwhile, according to Rohan, four local outlets have ignored his recommended retail price and are successfully selling the book at twice that amount.
Two other outlets have declined to stock it, he says, because they regard him as “too controversial”.
Rohan appears more amused than wounded by that distinction, joking that it places him in the company of James Joyce and Edna O’Brien – although, so far, Rambles and Ramblings of a Blow In has not required the intervention of the censor.
That mixture of affection, mischief and candour seems an appropriate character for a book that began as a practical booklet and ended as something resembling a memoir of place.
This article was written by Michael McFarland Campbell and first appeared in Gyronny Herald.