Product Description

"Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage" 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. Tim Robinson's epic exploration of the desolate, storm-lashed, limestone rocks, which have already haunted generations of Irish writers, takes the form of a clockwise journey around the coast. Every cliff, inlet and headland reveals layers of myth and historical memory, and Robinson makes beautifully crafted observations about the habits of birds, plants and the humans who lived there and endured, leaving records in stone - on the walls, cairns and ancient forts - in story and in oral tradition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136611 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
Tim Robinson was born in Yorkshire and has made his home in the far west of Ireland since 1972. He is a writer, mathematician and mapmaker.

Customer Reviews

A Great Sense of Place.
This book takes the reader on a journey around the coast of Arainn - the largest of the Aran Islands off the West coast of Ireland. The level of detail in the work seems daunting at first, but as the book builds you become used to this style. Every headland, inlet and shore has been named and there is often a story or two (or three) to account for each name.
The degree of connection between the landscape and those who named the parts must have been both intense and intimate, and the author succeeds in conveying both the land and the people. The landscape of the island is fragmented into section by the nature of its geology - limestone naturally weathering into blocks along lines of the weakness created when the rock itself was formed. The book itself seems to take a similar structure. The journey around the island is the books underlying geology, which is presented in a sequence of sections, each part of the whole but also distinct from the rest of the work.
We may be losing our understanding of the human connection to landscape and place, but this book is as clear a statement of the power of place as one could wish to read.