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    The Stones of Aran, Pilgrimage

    by Tim Robinson, Robert Macfarlane (Introduction)

    Paperback

    $22.95
    $22.95

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    Tim Robinson was brought up in Yorkshire. He studied at Cambridge University and worked as a teacher and artist in Istanbul, Vienna, and London. In 1972 he moved to the Aran Islands, where he gained fame as a mapmaker. He learned Gaelic and began preserving Irish place-names, winning respect as an environmentalist and a Ford European Conversation Award. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, published in 1985, won the Irish Book Award Literature Medal and a Rooney Prize Special Award for Literature in 1987. His other books include Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara, and My Time in Space.

    Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind (2003), about wilderness and the Western imagination, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian First Book Award, among other prizes.

    Table of Contents


    Introduction     ix
    Timescape with Signpost     5
    South     23
    Before Beginning     25
    The Architecture of Destruction     29
    Connoisseurs of Wilderness     31
    This Vale of Tears     33
    Ocean Walls and Windows     34
    Little Sean's Boulder and Other Stones     37
    Prospective     39
    A Class Division     41
    Sea-Marks     42
    Signatures     44
    Nine Fathoms     46
    Duchathair     50
    Styles of Flight     55
    Wrack     57
    Arguments from Weakness     58
    The Cliffman's Kingdom     63
    A Marine Cathedral     70
    Seats on the Clifftop     72
    Brachiopods and Bullets     76
    Harbour Without Boats     78
    The Worm and the Root     81
    Dun Aonghasa: The Direct Approach     84
    Dun Aonghasa: A Legendary Perspective     86
    Posthumous Career of the Fir Bolg     94
    Dun Aonghasa: A Closer Look     103
    Perdition's Edge     110
    Tides of the Other World     114
    Life on the Brink     116
    Divisions of the Land     119
    An "Agrarian Outrage"     122
    Fear of Falling, Fear of Failing     128
    Looking Back     132
    Excursion     139
    North     159
    Premonitions     161
    Leviathan     162
    A Difficult Mile     166
    The Seaweed Gatherers     171
    On the Shores of the Past     175
    Shore Divisions     180
    Blackweed and Redweed     183
    Women's Work     186
    Poets on the Shore     189
    Fortune and Misfortune     192
    The Kelp Age     194
    Smoke and Ash     199
    Afterimages, Afterthoughts     205
    Man of Aran     212
    History of a Stranger     222
    Fishermen of Cill Mhuirbhigh     225
    Writing on the Beach     229
    The Luck of the Shore     234
    The Irish Iodine & Marine Salts Mfg. Co. Ltd.     239
    The Fingerprint     243
    Sailing on a Stone     246
    Looking into Other Lives     254
    Differences Between Limestone and Granite     260
    Yet Two More Bays     266
    The Drowned Woman     268
    The Feast of Saints Peter and Paul     269
    The Minister's Sand     274
    The Generations     280
    Destruction and Reconstruction     285
    Point of Arrival     291
    The Bay of Doubt     298
    The Field of the Cloak     305
    Cill Einne: The Village     309
    Aircin: The Castle     313
    Aircin: The Pawn     330
    Cromwell's Walls     335
    Aer Arann     339
    Bones in the Sand     342
    Sands in the Wind     348
    Straw Island     357
    The Step     360
    Easy Going     365
    Upon This Rock     368
    Sources     371
    Maps
    The Aran Islands and Neighbouring Coasts     381
    Arainn     382
    Index     385
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    The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants’ traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants’ traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. After a visit with his wife in 1972, Tim Robinson moved to the islands, where he started making maps and gathering stories, eventually developing the idea for a cosmic history of Árainn, the largest of the three islands. Pilgrimage is the first of two volumes that make up Stones of Aran, in which Robinson maps the length and breadth of Árainn. Here he circles the entire island, following a clockwise, sunwise path in quest of the “good step,” in which walking itself becomes a form of attention and contemplation.

    Like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Stones of Aran is not only a meticulous and mesmerizing study of place but an entrancing and altogether unclassifiable work of literature. Robinson explores Aran in both its elemental and mythical dimensions, taking us deep into the island’s folklore, wildlife, names, habitations, and natural and human histories. Bringing to life the ongoing, forever unpredictable encounter between one man and a given landscape, Stones of Aran discovers worlds.

    Robinson’s voyage continues in Stones of Aran: Labyrinth

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    From the Publisher
    "This is a heart-felt and informative micro-history, and a eulogy and an elegy as well. Robinson is especially good on Aran's once great but now vanished kelp industry, and all that was involved....this is a fine addition to a fertile genre." —The Times (London)

    "A loving anatomy of the largest of the Aran Islands off the West Coast of Ireland, in which the point where nature and culture meet in the island is observed with great beauty and precision." -Colm Toibin

    "Tim Robinson's maps and books honor the landscapes they describe. As invitations, they irresistibly beckon the archeologist, botanist, geologist, bird-watcher, folklorist, student of the Irish language, or just plain tourist." -Chet Raymo.

    "Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Labyrinth...is a necessity for all visitors and walkers."—Guardian

    "An exquisitely detailed portrait of a special landscape, this is a gem-like addition to the travel genre."-Publishers Weekly

    "Robinson takes the reader on a meditative walking tour of Aran...[he] seeks the essence of an increasingly distant Celtic past...like a visitor peering through the warped and colored glass of an ancient church window." -Los Angeles Times

    "A kind of travel writing The New Yorker sometimes sponsors: a virtuosity of gratuitous fact-gathering, a penitential recording of minutiae, a recitation of information as if it were prayer." -New York Times

    "Looked upon with a tactful, eager, strategic care that is as tender in its address as an admission of love...It is a wonderful achievement." -Seamus Deane, London Review of Books

    "The best book ever written by an Englishman about Ireland." -Independent

    "One of the most original, revelatory and exhilarating works of literature ever produced in Ireland." -Irish Times

    "Rapt, encyclopedic volumes...Robinson has done for the west of Ireland what Ruskin did for Venice, Proust for the voids and vasts of time." -Telegraph

    "Climate and location, flora and fauna, culture, myth and legend, people, and over it all, the veneer of language and place name...Tim Robinson achieves this ultimate map in Stones of Aran" -New Scientist

    "Wholly irresistible." -Observer

    "This is a marvelous book—quirky and endearing, universal in scope yet with an extraordinary sense of place and purpose." -Sydney Morning Herald

    "One of the most interesting and important books produced in Ireland in the twentieth century. In prose as layered and rich as the area he explores, Robinson deals with space in the way Proust deals with time." —Sean Dunne

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