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

View to the Twelve Bens mountains: ‘Not a thing lies between, only bog and scrub and pockets of water and the shadows of clouds travelling over the land.’ Photograph: David Robertson/Alamy

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.