Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage

Tim Robinson was born in 1935 and brought up in Yorkshire, England. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked as a teacher and artist in Istanbul, Vienna, and London. In 1972 he moved to the Aran Islands to write and make maps. He now lives in Roundstone, County Galway. Among his books are Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and Other Writings (1996), My Time in Space (2001), Tales and Imaginings (2002), and two volumes of a projected trilogy, Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006) and Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness (2008). His Folding Landscape Project, which won a major European Conservation Award in 1987, has produced radically new maps of the Burren in County Clare, the Aran Islands, and Connemara. »

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. »

Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage

By Tim Robinson
Introduction by Robert Macfarlane

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

Reviews

This is a heart-felt and informative micro-history, and a eulogy and an elegy as well....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 Tóibín

Also see:

Stones of Aran: Labyrinth
By Tim Robinson
Introduction by John Elder

Robinson's stunning and erudite explorations of Ireland's Aran Islands show what travel writing at its very best can do: inform, inspire, and transform our ideas of place and history. "Robinson has done for the west of Ireland what Ruskin did for Venice, Proust for the voids and vasts of time." —Telegraph

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $18.95
Price: $14.21 (25% off)

Aug 5, 2008
416 pages
ISBN:
9781590172773
NYRB Classics
History

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