Stones of Aran: Labyrinth

By Tim Robinson
Introduction by John Elder

Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson's ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing. It is a project that draws on the legacies of Thoreau and Joyce, to which Robinson brings his own polymathic gifts as cartographer, mathematician, historian, and, above all, shaper of words.

In Pilgrimage Robinson walked the entire coast of Áirann, largest of the Aran islands. In Labyrinth he turns in to the island's interior. These two books—parts of an inseparable whole that can, for all that, be read quite separately from each other—constitute a vast polyphonic composition, at once encyclopedic and lyrical, scientific and surprisingly personal. Exploring the illimitable complexity and bounty contained in the seemingly limited confines of a single island, Robinson invites us to look without and within and to see the wonder of the world.

Reviews

One of the most sustained, intensive, and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried out.... As with all great landscape works, it is at once territorially specific and utterly mythic.
— Robert Macfarlane

I do not believe there is another book in the world like it.... Robinson has achieved the impossible: by taking a geographical reality, describing it so meticulously, and embedding it in a past of folktales, legends, and history he has thwarted the transience of at least one small part of the globe.
— Cees Nooteboom

Looked upon with a tactful, eager, strategic care that is as tender in its address as an admission of love...Robinson's Aran will, inevitably, become part of the general myth. It is a wonderful achievement.
— Seamus Deane, London Review of Books

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.
— The New York Times

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

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

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

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: Pilgrimage By Tim Robinson Introduction by Robert Macfarlane Mapmaker Tim Robinson moved to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland in the 1970s and fell in love with their geography and history. In Pilgrimage, he walks the perimeter of Árainn, its largest island, and the result is "a loving anatomy...in which the point where nature and culture meet in the island is observed with great beauty and precision." (Colm Tóibín)

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