It is no surprise that the Surrealist artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88) was so intrigued by Glendalough, the monastic settlement in County Wicklow. The valley, with its round tower, holy well and other relics of a medieval cloistered piety, proved not only inspiring but also spiritually stimulating. In a poem of 1933, W.B. Yeats, who, like Colquhoun was preoccupied by the occult and involved with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, described how the ‘stream and sun’ there made him feel ‘self-born, born anew’. In her travelogue The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (first published in 1955 and now reissued by Pushkin Press), Colquhoun adds to the catalogue of those who felt Glendalough to be otherworldly. She recalls Art O’Murnaghan’s vision of ‘phantasmal forms’ around the upper lake and, as if to corroborate the artist’s experience, is quick to relay her own peculiar sightings: ‘I do not disbelieve him,’ she writes, ‘I have myself seen’ similar ‘entities’ in Cornwall. Her sense of the macabre is elastic enough to accommodate the mundane. She claims that these ghostly forms are ‘palpable’ and drift towards the water like ‘airborne tarpaulin’. Others, she notes, are the ‘size of a haystack’, with ‘filaments’ like ‘the guy-ropes of a tent’.

This readiness for rapture, an eagerness to suspend disbelief, is apparent throughout Colquhoun’s account. She cheerfully rehashes local folklore, outlining ‘fairy traditions’ and probing the validity of a Marian apparition at Knock. ‘In all there remains,’ she concludes, ‘after discounting everything that can be discounted, an irreducible minimum of cases for which common-sense explanation is inadequate.’ Colquhoun had done her research and her itinerary is impressively varied. She flits from the Connemara coast to a party in the Dublin suburb of Ballsbridge, admires the ‘darkened and desiccated’ (though miraculously undecayed) head of Oliver Plunkett on a Drogheda altar and then visits ‘Mrs. Yeats’ to discuss an essay on the poet.

For the most part, Colquhoun is an incisive observer of Irish social mores and prejudices. During a production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gate Theatre, she remarks on the hypocrisy that allows audiences to embrace Wilde as a dramatist while also upholding the ‘law that condemned him’. Later, she rebukes the political party that ‘rules the world in Ireland’ for its ‘fanatical censorship’. ‘One of the few points in favour of Partition,’ she comments wryly, ‘is that banned books and contraceptives can be smuggled across the Ulster border.’ At times, however, her commentary coarsens. She finds the poverty in Dublin touchingly anachronistic. It is a type of ‘picturesque beggary’ that is ‘unbred by the welfare state’, where a child in the city’s ‘slummier quarters’ resembles a ‘quattrocento angelin’.

Colquhoun’s attentiveness, as well as her tendency to veer from reality towards the overly aesthetic, hints at an overlap between her writing and her painting. Scylla (1938), which is currently on display at Tate Britain as a part of the first major exhibition on Colquhoun, shows how body and landscape routinely become enmeshed. Two rocks jut out of a clear sea, but they, and the perilous straits between them, also resemble two legs, raised in the bathtub. Simultaneously phallic and feminine, the oil painting is a triumph of what Colquhoun called the ‘double image’. Many of her pieces are like this – vaguely but unavoidably vaginal – and The Crying of the Wind suggests that these are not just the visual pyrotechnics of a Surrealist but also the artist’s instinctive view of the world. At the neolithic monument at Newgrange, she imagines the mound as the ‘womb of life’ or ‘the vagina of the Bride’. ‘I never see plan drawings of such monuments without being reminded of the diagrams in a gynaecological textbook,’ she says.

Colquhoun’s susceptibility to seeing double is not always compelling. Beneath her sympathy for Ireland (and she is undeniably sympathetic to Ireland’s struggle under ‘England’s tyranny’), there is a submerged kind of solipsism. The country is something of a cipher. In ancient Ireland there was ‘no history’, ‘no writing’ and ‘no time’. There was ‘no need for clocks’, she claims wistfully, because even now ‘existence in relation to the moment is all’ in Ireland. Here, she strays into the tenuous terrain of Freudian psychoanalysis. By her diagnosis, the ‘Celtic strain’ is the ‘repressed unconscious’, the ‘irrational, the life of phantasy and humour’, the ‘incalculable id’ that is ridiculed and reviled by the Anglo-Saxon ‘superego’. Although Colquhoun no doubt felt that she had cultivated her Celtic strain, the eagerness to extrapolate beyond the actuality of her surroundings undermines her otherwise sensitive observation. The Crying of the Wind, on the whole, attests to an eccentric visitor not only willing to embrace the country but also to expend her creative energy on its history, idiosyncrasies and traditions.

The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colqhoun is published by Pushkin Press.