MOUNTAIN LOG BOOKS 117 traverse everything from alpine to desert terrain. Dermot’s dramatic accounts and essays bring the reader across the world with him and home to Ireland. Dermot Somers was born in the heart of Ireland in County Roscommon. He compares the state of the countries he visits to his local memory of the history of Ireland. In ‘Out of Tibet,’ he writes how he saw Ireland mirrored there, “the destruction of Gaelic culture in Elizabethan Ireland, centuries earlier. A native population was forced off the land.” Dermot writes in ‘Dumbstruck’ about the Irish language hanging on “against crushing, modern odds, refusing to die in spite of centuries of colonisation.” His comparisons are urgently, contextually relevant. Dermot is a natural raconteur, and he uses his storytelling talent in his dramatic accounts. As “one journey becomes another,” the reader not only experiences the landscape, but is introduced to the people who breathe life into Dermot's narratives. Where Dermot refines his talent as a storyteller is in his short fiction. His stories resemble travel fiction; some of them are first-person accounts, others third-person narration. Fed by his experience of the world, Dermot’s characters are interesting, and their stories absorbing. Dermot explores the motifs of music and language throughout his writing. Both themes hold Irish resonance but can help in navigating any new place. Conversation and travel are synonymous, and Dermot depicts it strikingly, describing a new language to be “like music: the sound itself expresses something of the culture that shapes it.” Somers also writes about his “musical sense of landscape.” His ability to hear a musicality within the landscapes that surround him, and in the languages found within them, transfers into his writing. Uncommon Ground is about outdoor people and mountaineers in impressively diverse terrain. The writing is in pieces, but the shared themes allow them to weave together. Collectively, they create an impressive personal report of Dermot Somers and a vast cultural log of the places that make up his history. Cara Scullion is a member of Mountaineering Ireland and is a climber and climbing wall instructor, working in Boulderworld Climbing Gym in Belfast. She is the current secretary of Queen’s University Belfast Mountaineering Club.
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