This essay follows an earlier visit to Skjolden in Norway, where Wittgenstein built his hut. Weeks later I travelled to Rosroe in Ireland, where he lived for a time in a cottage on the Atlantic edge.
Four weeks after Norway, I was with my friend Áine in Rosroe, where Wittgenstein had lived in 1948. In Irish, An Ros Rua means the red headland, a name drawn perhaps from the colour of the soil or the heather.
Already in that name lies a history. By 1948 the Irish language was in retreat, dealt a near-fatal blow by the famine a century earlier. Entire communities had disappeared, and with them the speech that had named the land for centuries. Even before that, in the 1830s, the first Ordnance Survey had begun anglicising placenames. The Irish became twisted into approximations that sounded familiar on English tongues but bore little trace of the places they once named. To map was to measure, and in the measuring something was taken. Placenames had their meanings diminished.
Áine and I have been friends more than thirty years. People talk about chosen family; Áine is mine. We set out on small adventures that need no explanation. A year ago we took a boat to Holy Island on Lough Derg a few days before Edna O’Brien was to be buried there. On one level it was an unlikely resting place for the woman whose work was once condemned from altars. Yet in her defiance the island seemed fitting. We could not explain exactly why we were there. It felt like a consecration, two still-living non-conformists preparing the ground for one of our heroines. Perhaps it makes no sense, but it does not need to. Sometimes you can know without saying.
We did not need to explain Rosroe much either. We wanted to stand where Wittgenstein once stood, at the edge of Ireland, on a headland named for the colour of its landscape.
The cottage still stands at the head of Killary Harbour, though from outside it looks more like a modern bungalow. In the 1950s it was turned into a youth hostel, later it went into private ownership and is now a holiday home. Inside, renovations were under way. Some of the plaster had been removed from the walls and behind it I could see traces of the original stone. Outside, the day was brilliantly clear. Sunlight lay across the fjord and the mountains on either side. For long moments the harbour held its silence until it was broken by the splutter of an engine and the shouts of tourists heading out in a small boat. I smirked, thinking of Wittgenstein’s irritation. He often complained about noise. Even here, he was not spared.
Rosroe brought Skjolden to mind again. In Norway, Wittgenstein had been beginning. The hut above Lake Eidsvatnet was a place of construction, severe and exacting. There he conceived the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book of crystalline propositions, language imagined as a mirror of the world, each sentence honed to the point of refusal. At its close he set a boundary around what could be said, and counselled silence beyond it.
Rosroe belonged to another time. He was fifty-nine, in poor health, working on fragments that would become the Philosophical Investigations. It was no longer a matter of building from scratch. He circled, wrote, rewrote, refused to conclude. What looked like retreat was a kind of worn humility, the work of a man circling back, letting philosophy sink down again into the rough ground of daily life.
The two huts tell Wittgenstein’s story. Skjolden feels Platonic, perched high above the fjord, its timbers set against the wind, austere and certain. Rosroe by contrast is Aristotelian, lived-in and altered, carrying the marks of time, attentive to the particulars of daily speech. His philosophy, too, had turned: the Tractatus was crystalline and ideal, but in the west of Ireland he wrote about words in use, language in practice, meaning shaped by the sea-smelling lobster pots outside his door.
Yet the ordinary here was fractured. The Irish language had been broken by famine, and what survived was being pushed aside. English was advancing. Words like Rosroe or Killary still carried older meanings but only as echoes, half-heard. Wittgenstein was writing about the utility of language, words in life, but the daily speech of this place was vanishing.
What happens when a language dies? It is more than the loss of vocabulary. A whole way of seeing goes with it. Cadences shaped by a place. Images carried by idiom. Experiences that slip when you try to translate them, turning strange in the mouth, their shape no longer quite the same. In Irish, a word like dúchas carries lineage, place, and belonging all at once, yet in English it shrinks to a flat inheritance. When another language takes over, something intimate is forced to speak in a foreign key.
Perhaps this is closer to Wittgenstein than we think. He knew what it was to live with meanings that had no public language. To live what could not be spoken. In Rosroe, the philosopher of ordinary language was living in a place where the ordinary language itself was being undone.
Later that evening Áine and I joined our friends Ciaran and Jackie who were holidaying in a motorhome on Silver Strand. After Rosroe it felt good to gather at a table, to share food and laughter, the rhythm of friendship. Outside, the sun sank slowly, colouring the Atlantic not with fire but with a soft pastel pink that gave the water a fleeting aquamarine hue. It reminded me of the lake at Skjolden, as if the two places spoke to each other for a moment.
Driving home along the Atlantic coast I told Áine I had never seen the sun set on the ocean in a cloudless sky before. We watched and wondered what would happen. It dimmed and became obscure. Science can explain the dimming and the slow obscurity before the sun finally disappeared. Yet it felt more than physics, a Wittgensteinian mystery that asked for silence.
The sky behind us was still pink, the ocean at our side growing darker. Wittgenstein had counselled silence beyond words, and it was there that friendship settled, unspoken, as the road carried us home.
Consilium 
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