Book description
'Stone of Aran: Pilgrimmage' is, as Robert Macfarlane says in his
introduction, 'one of the msot sustained, intensive and imaginative
studies of a place that has ever been carried out.' That place is one of
the most mysterious and oldest inhabited landscapes in the world, the
islands of Aran off the west coast of Ireland. Dsolate, storm-lashed
limestone rocks, the islands have been meticulously cultivated for four
thousand years, divided up into tiny plots of land that were worked with
hard, unremitting labour. Fishing in the open Atlantic seas provided
another, lethally dangerious, living. The people who lived there endured
and left records in stone, story and oral tradition. Tim Robinson's epic
exploratin of hte islands, which have already haunted generations of
Irish writers, takes the form of a clockwise journey around the coast of
Aran. Every cliff, inlet and headland reveals layers of myth and
historical memory, and Robinson amkes beautifully crafted observations
about the habits ofbirds, plants and humans. There are walls, cairns and
ancient forts whose meaning and function is still not clear. And there
is the relentless weather, and the strange properties of limestone,
slowly dissolving in the rain. This is an unforgettable, uncategorisable
book. 'The best book ever written by an Englishman about Ireland.'
Jonathan Keates, 'Independent.' 'Aran is not just an island to him. It
is an ultimate place ... It is a wonderful achievement.' Seamus Deane,
'London Review of Books'. 'Robinson deals with space the way Proust
deals with time.' Sean Dunne.
Tim Robinson, map-maker and writer, was born in England in 1935. He
studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked as a teacher and artist in
Istanbul, Vienna and London. In 1972 he moved to the West of Ireland and
began writing and making maps. He now lives in Roundstone, Connemara,
where he runs the Folding Landscapes studio with his wife Máiréad.
