Stone of Aran: Pilgrimmage is, as Robert Macfarlane says in his introduction, 'one of the most 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. Desolate, 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...

"A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past."—John Banville"He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility."—Colm TóibínIn its landscape, history, language, and folklore, the Connemara region on Ireland's wild and windswept West Coast is a dramatic and breathtaking ...

In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape in Ireland—weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region's mythologies.From the northern fiord waters of Killary Harbour to the southern sea-washed islands of Slyne Head, western Connemara awes with a rugged landscape: sloping cliffs, towering mountains, and the ever-present thudding of the...

From the two volumes of Stones of Aran to the essays collected in Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and My Time in Space, Tim Robinson has established himself as one of the great non-fiction writers at work in the English language. In light of this, Tales and Imaginings, a collection of imaginative writings from five decades, might seem a profound departure, but to read it is to encounter anew the integrity and connectedness of Robinson's body of work. In the earliest stories gathere...

In these fourteen related works we witness a great writer, artist and cartographer united with his subject, conveying the vivid experiences of a quarter-century of exploring and mapping the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara. 'Islands and Images' describes the Aran Islands themselves; 'Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara', the title-essay, elevates the map-maker's craft into art; 'The View from Errisbeg' integrates the landscapes of Galway Bay, the Burren and Connemara by way of to...

In an essay from 1996 collecton Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and Other Essays, Tim Robinson noted that 'we are spatial entities, which is even more basic than being physical entities, subject to the law of gravity'. In this dazzling new series of essays Robinson examines aspects of his own 'time in space', moving from his childhood in Yorkshire, to a deadly moment on a Malayan airstrip, a pilgrimage to the midnight sun, adventures in the art-worlds of Istanbul, Vienna and London...

A mapmaker's vivid journey through the geography, ecology, and history of Ireland's Connemara region.Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker's pace. From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place's geography, ecology, and history.We begin with the earth right in front of his boots, as Robinson unveils swaths of fiontarnach—fall leaf decay. We peer from the ed...

Like J.M. Synge almost a century before him, Tim Robinson portrays the inner and outer life of a landscape and its inhabitants. Encyclopedia of myth and reality, herbal, love-letter, missal, jest-book, anthology of cultural responses – Stones of Aran juggles modes from page to page. Its apparent inexhaustibility is borrowed from just one scrap of the Earth's surface: Arainn, the largest of the three Aran islands, off Ireland's west coast. The first volume, Pilgrimage, led the reader around...

"I find him to be a kindred spirit, a sympathetic but shrewd enquirer, a companionable stroller, and a lover of anecdotes gathered by the wayside."So Tim Robinson described folklorist, revolutionary, and district justice Seán Mac Giollarnáth, whose 1941 book Annála Beaga ó Iorras Aithneach revealed his sheer delight in the rich language and stories of the people he encountered in Conamara, the Irish-speaking region in the south of Connemara. From tales of ...

In the aftermath of the Great Famine of 1845-52, the Martin Estate in the West of Ireland, 200,000-acres of bog and mountain, was put up for sale. Its mortgagees, the London Law Life Insurance Society, evicted many of the tenants, and in February 1853 sent Thomas Colville Scott to conduct a survey of their property. This is his journal, recently discovered at an auction-house in England. Colville Scott records many an extraordinary encounter with individual survivors of the famine, some tr...

In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas.Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, "If...

In critical opinion and popular polls, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Graveyard Clay is invariably ranked the most important prose work in modern Irish. This bold new translation of his radically original Cré na Cille is the shared project of two fluent speakers of the Irish of Ó Cadhain’s native region, Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson. They have achieved a lofty goal: to convey Ó Cadhain’s meaning accurately and to meet his towering literary standards.   Grave...