The history of the British Isles could be well told through its five great rocks — granite, sandstone, slate, chalk, and limestone. There are others, of course: schist, shale, basalt, the clays. But these five form a strong mineral pentangle within which the islands and their pasts are contained.
Each of these rocks has its character, and each its literary keepers. Granite is Ted Hughes's stone, and that of DH Lawrence in Kangaroo. Chalk belongs to the southern downlanders: EM Forster, GK Chesterton, Gilbert White. Sandstone to Hugh Miller, slate to Jim Perrin, Caradog Prichard, Kate Roberts.
Limestone has been blessed with two exceptional 20th-century writers. The first of these is WH Auden, who so loved the high karst shires of the northern Pennines. What most moved Auden about limestone was the way it eroded. Limestone is soluble in water, which means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear. Thus the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a metaphysical as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone a very human honesty — an acknowledgement that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.
The second of the great limestone writers is Tim Robinson. On the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare, between the granite of Galway and the sandstones of Liscannor, rises a vast limestone escarpment, pewterish in colour on a dull day, silver in sunshine. The limestone begins in the area of north-west Clare known as The Burren — from the Gaelic boireann, meaning "rocky place". From there it extends in a north-west direction, dipping beneath the Atlantic, to resurge thirty miles offshore as three islands: Árainn, Inis Meáin, and Inis Oírr — or the Aran Islands, as they are also called.
In the summer of 2020, Robinson and his wife (to whom he refers in his writings only as M) came from London to Árainn, the largest of the islands, to live. Their first winter there was a difficult one. Big Atlantic storms, brief days, and "an unprecedented sequence of deaths, mainly by drowning or by falls and exposure on the crags". But they stayed, and Robinson — a mathematician by training, an artist by vocation, and a draughtsman of skill — began to cast around for a way to respond creatively to the islands.
So began one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried out. Robinson conceived of a two-volume study of the islands — a local epic — which would be accompanied by a new map of the islands that he would survey and draw.
The first of these volumes, Pilgrimage, would describe a walk around the edge of Árainn. Robinson would walk sunwise, clockwise — "the circuit that blesses" — and he would walk not at "a penitential trudge, but at an inquiring, digressive, and wondering pace". He would write of the geology of the coast, of its weathers, its flora and fauna, but also of the human history, lore and myth which had accreted around each littoral feature. Once this beating of the island's bounds, this tracking of the "mortal edges of the holding", was complete, he would then delve into its complicated interior for the second volume: Labyrinth.
Long before psycho-geography became a modishly over-used and under-comprehended term, Robinson was out on the derive — talking to the islanders, walking the rimrock, surveying, dreaming, recording. In bad weather, of which there was plenty, he would hold his notebook and pencil inside a clear plastic bag, tied shut at his wrists, and proceed in this manner: a deranged dowser wandering the mists and the storm-spray.
For years, Robinson walked, and as he did so the sentences began to come — beautiful, dense, paced. The result, finished in 2020, was the 830-page Stones of Aran diptych, Pilgrimage and Labyrinth: an exceptional investigation of the difficulties and rewards of dwelling, and of the deep entanglement of the human and the mineral. As with all great landscape works, it is at once territorially specific and utterly mythic. Árainn, the one island, becomes a paradigm of "broken, blessed Pangaea" — the world on which we all live, and whose materiality we differently adore and resist.
Many landscape writers have striven to give their prose the characteristics of the terrain they are describing. Few have succeeded as fully as Robinson. The erosive habits of limestone means that it is rich with clandestine places: runnels, valleys, crevasses, dens, hollows, gulleys. It possesses the vast, involuted surface area of a coastline or a lung's interior. So too does Robinson's prose, the polished surfaces of which contain an enormous complexity of thought.
Robinson's writing also shares with limestone a concern for historical record. Limestone's solubility, as Robinson brilliantly writes, makes it "a uniquely tender and memorious ground. Every shower sends rivulets wandering across its surface, deepening the ways of their predecessors, and gradually engraving their initial caprices as law into the stone." The "memorious" properties of limestone — its faultless recording of its own faults — is matched both by the ancient oral culture of the Aran Islands, and by Robinson's patient, generous record-keeping.
Reading Pilgrimage or Labyrinth one marvels at the density of the cultural strata which have settled over the landscape itself, and at the care and precision with which Robinson excavates them. He records how places have been named, and why. How fishing, or bird-hunting, or seaweed-gathering have occurred differently on the different cliffs and storm-beaches. How stone — a substance "which may fall but still endures" — has been so variously used as shelter, boundary-mark and tool. Always, Robinson is interested in the direct current of cause between geology and human behaviour: how, endlessly, the mineral ramifies into the contemporary.
There is no plot to Robinson's books, as there is no plot to a landscape. They proceed by the ancient contingencies of geology and the immediate contingencies of footfall, and by resonance, pattern, intuition and form. A fine example of this comes early in Pilgrimage, where Robinson is writing of the lateral fault-lines in limestone cliffs. Suddenly he lifts his eyes skywards, to spot a white contrail left by an aeroplane flying from Shannon airport. "I have seen", he writes, "their departures follow on so closely that three or four are glinting in the sky at once and their vapour-trails entwine and merge and are scored into the blue as if the sky itself were weakened, fissured and veined, along an invisible line of predestined fall."
How beautiful and layered an image it is. There is the swift movement from lithic to aerial, and, simultaneously, the jolt of perspective from prehistoric to present (the telescope clapped quickly shut against the palm). Through it all runs the sense that these miraculous aeroplanes represent all that will eventually cause us to fall.
Robinson's different works — his maps, his essays, his forthcoming book on Connemara, the magnificent Stones of Aran — fold into a single visionary attempt to find "our way back to the world". He writes, in his austerely passionate manner, of wanting in his art to "forge the contradictions" of modernity "into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground". This is, he knows, an impossible task: too great for a single person, a single lifetime. But he attempts it nonetheless, for Árainn is "the exemplary terrain upon which to dream of that work" — and because such an attempt must be made, if our line of predestined fall is to be over-stepped.