Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (30 page)

This is a lightly reworked version of an essay written for
The
Geo
graphical
Magazine
(London, December 1976) to mark the publication of my first map of the Aran Islands. Several themes in it concerning the big island were subsequently enlarged upon in
Stones
of
Aran.
I have added some anecdotes from my diary, that lapse of time now authorizes me to publish, about the two smaller islands. Of course many changes for good and ill have taken place since the period I am describing. The original title has been restored (it appeared as ‘Aran Surrounded by Water’, which annoyed me at the time but now seems quite acceptable).

Written in London in 1981 as a private memorandum, according to my diary, ‘to convey the strangeness of my experience, & the degree to which it seems to happen inside me, as if the people I met were my own creations. But what seems graspable when I lie dreaming back over it sifts away like fine sand between my fingers when I sit down before the cold clattering typewriter.’ I am happy that Antony Farrell later carried it off to inaugurate Lilliput’s list (
Lilliput
Pamphlets
/
1, Mullingar 1984).

This piece formed the Connemara and Aran chapter of
The
Book
of
the
Irish
Countryside
(Town House and The Blackstaff Press, 1987). I have curtailed some historical material dealt with in greater detail in ‘Space, Time and Connemara’.

The Burren chapter of
The
Book
of
the
Irish
Countryside
(1987). I have amended one or two obsolete remarks, rearranged some other material slightly, and thrown in a badger for good measure.

Written for my
Connemara,
Part 1,
Introduction
and
Gazetteer,
Part 2,
a
one-inch
map
(Folding Landscapes, Roundstone, 1990). It was also published in
Eire-Ireland
(Vol. XXIV No. 3, St Paul, Minnesota, Fall 1989) with unforgivable sub-editorial blemishings, and, restored, in
The
Mayo
Anthology
(ed. Richard Murphy, Castlebar, 1990). The title of this brief and tender evocation of a little patch of territory imitates another, the awesome comprehensiveness of which inflamed my childhood ambitions, though I was and am quite unable to read the work in question: the cosmologist Hermann Weil’s
Raum,
Zeit,
Materie.

This appeared in
The
Bulletin
of
the
Society
of
University
Cartographers
(Vol. 20, No. 1, Reading, June 1986) and in
The
American
Geographical
Society
Newsletter
(Vol. 9, No. 1, New York, 1989). I have recast one or two passages to avoid overlap with other essays in this volume. As to the trifling formula into which I sought to compress all the pathos and challenge of cartography, I had left it unsupported, as a minor infraction of the bounds of the literary (‘Never apologize, never derive!’); however, I will risk a line of proof here. If
S
is the scale of the map, then
T
cannot exceed
St,
and
M
is at best
m/S.
Hence
MT
***
mt,
which is a fixed amount given one’s means of representation. There is a teasing parallel with the Uncertainty Principle here.

A talk given at the first Conference of the Centre for Landscape Studies in University College, Galway, 1990. A short version was published in
Technology
Ireland
(Vol. 23, No. 3, June 1991), and a fuller one in
De
coding
the
Landscape
(ed. Timothy Collins, Galway, 1993). The reminiscence of Besicovitch and the attempt to explain fractional dimensions have been added more recently. In fact this piece seems still to be in evolution; it could become a book on Connemara, or on various other things.

Another very private meditation started in about 1979 and taken up again in 1990. It later came in useful as an intervention or interruption in a debate of mind-numbing cautiousness as to the proper definition of cartography that was occupying the professionals; I sent it to
The
Carto
graphic
Journal
with the suggestion that ‘Cartography was the cultivation
by graphic means of the compass rose’, and was as surprised as I was delighted that it was accepted (Vol. 29, No. 1, British Cartographic Society, June 1992). It also surfaced in
Decantations:
A
Tribute
in
Honour
of
Maurice
Craig
(Dublin, 1992).

The introduction to my edition of J.M. Synge’s
The
Aran
Islands
(Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, London 1992).

A talk first delivered at the 1992 Merriman Summer School, ‘Something to Celebrate: The Irish Language’, and published in
The
Irish
Review
(No. 14, Belfast, Autumn 1993); the present version was given at Ireland House, New York, in 1994.

This piece originated as ‘Secret Connemara’, a talk with slides and cassette recordings of folksongs, my contribution to the 1994 Toronto Conference (strangely entitled ‘The Haunted Ark’) of the Canadian Institute of Irish Studies; in recasting it as an essay I have added a layer of self-questioning.

Concocted to amuse the Botanical Society of the British Isles when I persuaded them to hold their 1994
AGM
in Roundstone. Published in
Irish
Botanical
News
(No. 5, February 1995).

The keynote address to the sixtieth anniversary conference of the Prehistoric Society, held in University College, Dublin, in September 1995.

A retrospect, conceived as a ‘Letter from Ireland’ and broadcast on
BBC
Radio 4 in January 1996.

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First published 1997 by
The Lilliput Press
62–63 Sitric Road,
Arbour Hill
Dublin 7, Ireland
www.lilliputpress.ie

This digital edition published 2012 by
The Lilliput Press

Copyright © Tim Robinson, 2012

ISBN print paperback 978 18 746 75747
ISBN eBook 978 18 435 12820

A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from
An Chomhairle Ealaion / The Arts Council of Ireland