Robinson Setting Foot on the Shores Of Connemara

1. Auflage 1996
ISBN: 978-1-84351-282-0
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

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 topography, botany and geology; 'Space, Time and Connemara', centrepiece to the collection, surveys the archaeology and human geography of the West, its settlement patterns, families, dispersals and privations, its missioners and the modern tide of tourism and mariculture; 'A Connemara Fractal' is a fascinating autobiographical digression through Cambridge and the convergences of mathematics, geometry and geology, towards landscape-theory and the Book of Connemara as yet unwritten; 'Place/Person/Book' introduces Synge's masterwork, The Aran Islands; 'Listening to the Landscape' takes for its theme the Irish language and placenames as an emanation of the land; 'Four Threads' connects four archetypal figures - smuggler, rebel priest, land-agent and wandering rhymer - to their histories in nineteenth century Connemara. Other texts rehearse the potencies of discovery, botanical (Erica mackaiana in Roundstone), archaeological (a Bronze Age quartz alignment in Gleninagh) and personal. Some are anecdotal, some meditative; each is individually conceived as a work of literature. Tim Robinson has been stepping into spacetime since 1972, mapping the unknown by way of the known. With Setting Foot on the Shore of Connemara he captures the numinous in a net of words and images, and creates his own illuminated manual of memory.

TIM ROBINSON, map-maker and writer, was born in England in 1935. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked as a teacher and artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London. In 1972 he moved to the West of Ireland and began writing and making maps. He now lives in Roundstone, Connemara, where he runs the Folding Landscapes studio with his wife.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robinson, Tim

Leseproben

1

Islands and Images

The geography of Aran was explained to us on our first visit by an old man: ‘The ocean’, he said, ‘goes all around the island.’ A few days’ rambles confirmed that fact, and revealed another: that to explore an island is to court obsession. We returned to live in Aran as soon as we could leave the city.

There is something compulsive in one’s relationship to an island. A mainland area with its ambiguous or arbitrary boundaries doesn’t constrain the attention in the same way. With an island, it is as if the surrounding ocean like a magnifying glass directs an intensified vision onto the narrow field of view. A little piece is cut out of the world, marked off in fact by its richness in significances. So an island appears to be mappable. Already a little abstracted from reality, already half-concept, it holds out the delusion of a comprehensible totality.

The island is held by the ocean as a well-formed concept is grasped by the mind. But the analogy breaks down, or is diversified; the ocean has broken down Aran into three islands, each in its own relationship to the other, to the mainland and to the ocean itself. These three islands of Aran (Oileáin Árann in Irish) are called Árainn, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr. I give them their proper names rather than the anglicized ones of Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer, because they are of the Irish-speaking region of western Ireland. The three islands sail in line-astern across the mouth of Galway Bay. First the biggest, Árainn, with a population of about nine hundred and the islands’ chief village, the fishing port of Cill Rónáin. The landfall for its trawlers is Ros a’ Mhíl on the Connemara coast, but the steamer brings in bread and tourists from Galway near the head of the bay, a three-hour sail if the weather favours. The next is Inis Meáin, the loneliest one, and the last is the smallest, Inis Oírr. About three hundred and twenty people live on each of these two, which have more to do with the Clare coast than with Connemara.

The three islands are the divided remains of a single limestone escarpment extending in a north-westerly direction from Clare. The ridge-line running from end to end of the group forms another division, transverse to the sea-straits, and is a natural axis for thought about the islands. North-east of this line: terraces bearing a mosaic of crops and pastures, villages, roads (and even too many cars, on the big island), and views across the sound into the multi-coloured depths of Ireland. South-west of the line: bare stone acres, cliffs and surge, the Atlantic horizon. This parallelism of community and solitude is most marked on the big island, where one can walk all day (making a map, perhaps), meeting nobody, getting lonely, and knowing that only twenty minutes away over the hill is a different world where every walk is a linear social occasion.

It was no doubt the common knowledge that I spent so much time exploring the unfrequented parts of the island that prompted Máire Bn. Uí Chonghaile, the postmistress of Cill Mhuirbhigh in Árainn, to suggest I make a map of it: tourists were always asking her for a map, and it was an embarrassment that the island could not provide one. In fact, the only maps covering Aran were the six-inch Ordnance Survey sheets, which broke the islands up into five awkward bits and were no less than seventy-five years out of date, and the skimpy half-inch map of the whole of Galway Bay. I produced a rough design for the map that same evening, the project appealed to me with such urgency. First, it would involve all the things I liked doing: walking, drawing, asking questions. Secondly, it fitted in with ideas I had been hatching about the effects of tourism on such communities. Aran has suffered a loss of confidence over the last few decades; the reasons for this go deep, and the summer invasion of visitors often critical of the islands’ ways and uninformed of their excellencies is a mere aggravating factor; yet it did not seem useless to commend the islands’ fragile uniqueness to the protection of the greater world, and this was a task a map could begin, if it could be made expressive of as well as informative about that uniqueness. Finally, a vague cloud of ideas about maps and their relationship to the place mapped, some of which I had half-realized in artworks before now, could perhaps be worked out in practice; thus the project appeared as a step in an interior evolution, and its execution as what I think of as a private work of art.

The making of a map, I soon found out, is many things as well as a work of art, and among others it is a political, or more exactly an ideological, act. The old Ordnance Survey shows this clearly. Whereas the nineteenth-century surveyors meticulously recorded every crooked wall on the islands, they handled the placenames with a carelessness that reveals contempt, often mishearing them and even misplacing them on the map, and crudely transliterating them in English phonetics. To the colonial administration of that time rents and rates came before any other aspect of life, and the language of the peasant was nothing more than a subversive muttering behind the landlord’s back. This historical insult stings the sharper in Aran because Irish is its first language, and although with each generation some of the placenames are forgotten or become incomprehensible, thousands of them still bring their poetry into everyday life. This made it intolerable that the barbarisms of the OS be perpetuated. Was it possible to make amends? For me, a beginner in Irish, it was a considerable challenge, but fortunately I didn’t realize that until I had become fascinated by the problem. A thesaurus of local history, anecdote and myth was to be deciphered among these stones; each farmer driving his cows from a field to a well, each fisherman setting his lobster-pots off a rocky shore, held the key to part of it – but I was soon to discover that persuading him to turn out his mental pockets and produce that key, however rusty, bent or broken, had to be a work of patience and cunning.

I was anxious to get on with the actual mapping as soon as possible, though I had little idea of how to go about it. It was to be a summer of unprecedented rains. Between showers I set off for the remotest village, Bun Gabhla, a group of ten dwellings in a hollow of the north-western shoulder of Árainn. One cottage-length seemed a unit good enough to let me sketch the layout of the village without obtrusive peering-about; back at home I could then identify the older cottages on the OS, and by a little deduction pinpoint the more recent ones. I sat on a wall and opened my notebook; a few drops of rain soon added their blurring commentary. On my way back up the hill I turned to look down on Bun Gabhla and check my work. A sea-mist had silently encircled the village, leaving it in a pool of light. A woman running out to the clothes-line behind her cottage, two children playing in the street, a goose stretching its neck in a little meadow, were all living in a world so small and detached I could almost pick it up and examine it; yet as I stood wrapped in semi-invisibility on the hillside I felt that my task was impossible, that no scale of miles could express the remoteness of this place. Often during that summer, struggling along briary paths in the rain, or on the cliffs trying to sketch the headlands with the wind ripping my notebook apart in my hands, I felt that this obstinate isle was not returning my love. It was only after my return the following spring with the completed and printed map that Aran rewarded me with a period of golden calm.

Most days of the mapping took me to and fro between the two aspects of the island, the convivial and the solitary, corresponding to the sheltered terraces of the scarp slope, and the dip slope inclining towards the afternoon sun and the Atlantic storms. Working along the main road that links the villages was my opportunity to talk to everyone, the women who run the little shops or who put up summer visitors (for I aimed to make the map a sort of gazetteer as well), and the farmer, fisherman, publican and priest I had to consult about placenames. All along the way men were at work, erecting the first factory of the islands, digging the trenches for an extension of the water supply, building houses, preparing a site for the generator which would give us electricity for the first time. The transformation of this face of the island was going ahead at an exhilarating and alarming pace; I saw that my map, recording a moment in a time of unprecedented changes, would quickly date.

From the main road the rough grassy side-roads or boreens lead across the terraces of little fields down to the northern coast or up on to the creigs (craga) as the bare rocky areas are called. The scale of these terraces is domestic; the tiny fields succeed each other like wry and tilted suites of rooms, and the boreens and ‘roadeens’ (róidíní) just wide enough for a cow that branch off from them, are more like hallways and staircases than public thoroughfares. Almost the entire area of the island is divided up by drystone walls into a maze of fields reached by a bewilderment of paths. Each field can feed two or three cows for a certain number of days, and this network of paths is mainly for driving cattle from one field to another, or to and from a spring, a job I was sometimes called upon to...