Finding Shelter: Remembering Tim Robinson

Tim Robinson on top of Binn Bhán, May 1985. Tim Robinson Collection, P120/3, James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway.

The writer, cartographer, artist, and autodidact Tim Robinson died of Covid-19 on 3 April 2020. He was trained as a mathematician, exhibited as a visual artist, and wrote prose that reads like a casual conversation with readers, the sort of writing that makes his subject matter—usually the landscape of Ireland—immediate and intimate. Robinson’s books, especially Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, engage readers in a walk across the landscape with someone who devoted his life to learning the language, geography, and ecology of this region. Above all, he was known for his skills in observation and learning, in detailing what he called “the fineness of things.”¹ Robinson’s death came only two weeks after that of his wife, Máiréad, with whom he ran Folding Landscapes, a publishing enterprise devoted primarily to their hand-drawn maps of the Aran Islands, The Burren, and Connemara.

In early April many of us received “shelter in place” orders. Across Ireland and across the world the idea was the same: stay in your home, the place you think of as a shelter. In reading about Robinson’s life in the Irish Times and Guardian obituaries, I realized that I already associated his writing and thinking with the idea of shelter and its fragility.² Although Tim Robinson is best known for his work on Connemara, I first encountered his two-part Stones of Aran and his essay collections, and through them came to see that a place—a region or landscape—might be a form of shelter. But also, perhaps conversely, Robinson’s writing emphasized that the environment around us works on a measure indifferent to the span of a single human life. He often wrote about time scales far beyond the human, beyond even what humans can reasonably conceive. In geologic time what we think of as shelter becomes laughably insubstantial.

Rereading Tim Robinson’s work after his death reminds me of how attuned he was to the brevity of human life—to our existence like a blip on the geologic timescale. Responsive to the fragility of what we see as monumental structures, he opens Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage with a meditation on the geologic processes that made the island’s limestone escarpments and the dramatic cliffs. This introduction concludes by observing that the limestone’s gradual decay under the force of the sea and against the slow dissolution of rainwater means that in the recognizable future Árainn “will ultimately dwindle to a little reef and disappear. It seems unlikely that any creatures we would recognize as our descendants will be here to chart that rock in whatever shape of sea succeeds to Galway Bay.”³

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Memory can be a good shelter, but like the ever-changing landscape Robinson charts in his books, it can shape-shift into something that fails to map onto what it was at the start. It reworks itself, linking together what might have been disparate events and times into a narrative whole. So we distrust it to tell us absolute truths. Robinson notes this uncertainty: “Sometimes I have followed the sound of words, trusting them (as a writer does; it is the difference between a writer and an intellectual) to lead me into sense.”⁴ Memory can work that way as well, bringing us to revelations that we would otherwise be too careful to uncover. My own experiences in meeting Tim and Máiréad, and in reading his work as a guide to real places, are tinted by time and reshaped into the comforting shelter of story.

I visited Inishmore, or Árainn, the largest of the islands, several times before I went there with Robinson’s book in hand sometime around 2004. I stayed at a hostel, and each day I bundled myself into a raincoat and hiking boots and set off with his map, folded and battered by the end, and Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. Robinson...