Stones of Aran

Maura Scannell of the National Botanic Gardens, Conor
Mac-Dermot
of the Geological Survey, Professor Etienne Rynne and Dr. John Waddell of the Archaeological Department, UCG, Professor T. S. Ó Máille, Dr. Angela Burke of Roinn na
Nua-Ghaeilge
, UCD, and the library staff of UCG—to these and to many others who backed me with learning, and to the several hundred Aran men, women and children who shared their lore with me, I owe the possibility of this book.

In County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, between the granite of Galway and the sandstone of Liscannor, rises a vast limestone escarpment—pewter in color on a dull day, and silver in sunshine. The limestone begins in the area of Clare known as the Burren, from the Gaelic
boireann
, meaning “rocky place.” It extends in a northwesterly direction, dipping beneath the Atlantic, to resurge thirty miles offshore as three islands: Árainn, Inis Meáin, and Inis Oírr—or the Aran Islands, as they are also called.

Limestone has been blessed with two exceptional English
writers
. The first of these is W. H. Auden, who loved the high karst shires of England’s Pennines. What most moved Auden about limestone was the way it eroded. Limestone is soluble in water, which means that any weaknesses in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of liquid wear. Thus the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a human as well as a mineral quality: he found in limestone a version of the truth that we are defined by our faults as much as by our substance.

The second of the great limestone writers is Tim Robinson. In the summer of 1972, Robinson and his wife—to whom he refers in his writing only as “M”—moved from London to Aran, the largest of the islands. Their first winter was difficult: big Atlantic storms, brief days, and “an unprecedented sequence of deaths [among the islanders], mainly by drowning or by falls and
exposure
on the crags,” all challenged their resolve to continue living there. But they did stay, and Robinson—a mathematician by
training and an artist by vocation—began to consider how he might respond creatively to his adopted landscape.

So began one of the most sustained, intensive, and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out. Robinson
conceived
of a local epic: a two-volume prose study of Aran,
accompanied
by a new map of all three islands (which he would survey and draw). He decided that he would not write a “diary of
intoxication
” about Aran, for enough of these already existed, penned by J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory among others. Instead the first volume,
Pilgrimage
, would describe a
circumambulation
of the island’s coast. Robinson would walk the coastline clockwise, sunwise—“the circuit that blesses”—and he would walk not at “a penitential trudge but at an inquiring, digressive and wondering pace.” The features of the coast would be the stations of this offbeat pilgrimage, and close attention would be its method of devotion. The landscape itself would improvise the narrative. Once this ritual beating of the island’s bounds was completed, he would then delve into Aran’s intricate interior for the second volume,
Labyrinth
.

Long before psycho-geography became a modish term,
Robinson
was out on the
dérive
: walking the rimrock, surveying, measuring, talking to the “custodians of local lore,” watching, dreaming, and recording. In bad weather—of which there is plenty on Aran—he would hold his notebook and pencil inside a clear plastic bag, tied shut at his wrists, and proceed in this
manner
. He must have looked, to those who encountered him, like a deranged dowser or pilgrim, wandering through the mists and the storm spray, hands locked together in mania or prayer.

For years, Robinson walked, and as he did the sentences began to come: beautiful, dense, paced.
Pilgrimage
was published in 1986, fourteen years after his arrival on Aran. As with all great landscape works (of which there are very few), it is at once
territorially
specific and utterly mythic. The one island becomes in Robinson’s view both a fragment of “broken, blessed, Pangaea” (a version of the world on which we all live, and whose materiality
we differently adore and resist) and also a terrain with its own intricate and indigenous histories. He wanted, as he put it, to remain attentive to “the subtle actualities of Aran life,” but also to “the immensities in which this little place is wrapped.” This
continual
vibration between the particular and the universal is one of the book’s most distinctive actions.

The opening chapter, “Timescape with Signpost,” offers a
creation
myth for Aran: its geological birth out of the ur-continent of Pangaea and from “its unbounded encircling ocean was
Panthalassa
, all-sea.” The writing here is fabulous in the old sense of that word: a localized version of Genesis, in which can distantly be heard the thunder of Old Testament rhythms. It places Aran and its people in the context of what John McPhee has called “deep time”: the geological perspective of past and future that can make human presence, “all our lore and our nightmares,” seem irrelevant. “Unless vaster earth-processes intervene,” writes Robinson, “Aran will ultimately dwindle to a little reef and
disappear
. It seems unlikely that any creatures we would recognize as our descendants will be here to chart that rock in whatever shape of sea succeeds to Galway Bay.” Such timescales make a nonsense of most human behavior and all human prejudices—especially that of nationalism. The idea that you can belong to a defined area of land, or even that a defined area of land can belong to you? Lunacy, says Robinson. Seen within the
perspective
of deep time, “the geographies over which we are so suicidally passionate are … fleeting expressions of the earth’s face.”

But after this opening vision of “immensity,” Robinson focuses tightly down upon Aran’s “actualities”: the habits of its birds,
animals
, and plants; its present human customs and pasts. Aran has been inhabited for more than four thousand years, and such
prolonged
human activity on such a limited area of land means that history exists thickly there. Each era has left its marks, usually in the form of stone (a substance that “may fall, but still endures”): cairns, walls, tombs, cashels, megaliths, cells, chapels … Robinson
treats each of these structures as a historical puzzle, whose origins and name might—with luck and diligence—be fathomed.

He brings this fierce curiosity to bear on all the phenomena that he encounters on his pilgrimage. How was the storm beach of Gort na gCapall formed? Why does the wren flourish on one side of Aran, and the raven on the other? Why is Cockle Strand so called? How were the puffins of Poll an Iomair, the trough-like cliff, harvested? What ceremonies surrounded the firing of the kelp kiln of Mainistir? Robinson investigates these questions, and thousands more. He is interested, to borrow a phrase from Les Murray, in only everything. Reading
Pilgrimage
, you are
astonished
at the density of the cultural strata that have settled over this landscape, and at the care and precision with which Robinson excavates them.

Many landscape writers have striven to give their prose the characteristics of the terrain they are describing. Few have
succeeded
as fully as Robinson. The erosive habits of limestone means that it is rich with clandestine places: runnels, crevasses, hollows, and gulleys. So too is Robinson’s style, the polished surfaces of which contain an enormous complexity of thought. Like
limestone
, his books are broken up into irregular sections. “Chapters” is not quite the word for these sections: better, perhaps, to call them “blocks,” or even “clints”—the exact term for the surface of a weathered slab of limestone.

Robinson’s writing also shares with limestone a concern for historical record. Limestone’s solubility, as he brilliantly observes, makes it “a uniquely tender and memorious ground. Every shower sends rivulets wandering across its surface, deepening the ways of their predecessors and gradually engraving their initial caprices as law into the stone.” The “memorious” properties of limestone are matched by the ancient oral culture of the Aran Islands; a collective “folk-mind” that is tenacious in its recall of story and its connection to place. This oral culture has, though, become
increasingly
vulnerable over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the islands have opened up to the outside world and what
Robinson anxiously calls “the material destructiveness of modern life.” So
Pilgrimage
can be understood as Robinson’s transcription and ordering of the island’s folk-mind—a memory-map. It is an attempt to safeguard perishable knowledge, and to slow the
evaporation
of Gaelic from the islands.

There is no plot to
Pilgrimage
, as there is no plot to a
landscape
. Robinson repeats himself with variation, because this is what his chosen terrain does. His narrative proceeds by the
ancient
contingencies of geology and the immediate contingencies of footfall, and by pattern, affinity, and form. Early in
Pilgrimage
, for instance, in a section called “Arguments from Weakness,” Robinson is remarking on the “schema of fissure-planes and
strata-partings
” that is visible in the sea cliffs and certain stone fields near An Aill Bhán, the White Cliff. Suddenly his imagination turns skyward, and he recalls seeing the contrails left by
transatlantic
airplanes flying from Shannon airport:

It is a beautiful and layered movement; from the fissured stone to the fissured sky, from the “memorious” rock to the “
murmurous
” machines, and from the prehistoric to the present. A movement, too, from the aesthetic to the moral. For the
implication
emerges that these miraculous airplanes, with their fouling vapor trails, represent all that will eventually bring us down. That poised final phrase, “predestined fall,” refers simultaneously to the trajectory of each airplane and to humanity’s own parabola toward self-destruction.

While he is never a prescriptive writer, Robinson is a committed writer, and his commitment is to the idea of what might loosely be termed living well upon the earth. All of Robinson’s works—his maps, his essays, his two-volume study of Connemara, and both books of
Stones
of Aran
—fold into a visionary attempt to find “our way back to the world.” He speaks, in his austerely passionate manner, of wanting in his art to forge the contradictions of modernity “into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground.” He knows this to be an impossible task: too great for a single person, a single lifetime. But he attempts it
nonetheless
, for the west of Ireland is “
the
exemplary terrain upon which to dream of that work”—and because such an attempt must be made, if our line of predestined fall is to be overstepped.

— R
OBERT
M
ACFARLANE