Diarmaid Ferriter: Tim Robinson long understood what crisis has taught us

It seems cruelly ironic that the late Tim Robinson became a victim of Covid-19 at the very time when the Covid crisis emphatically underlined the importance of his work and mission. When Yorkshire-born Robinson moved to the Aran Islands in 1972, his original aim was to write a novel and in that first winter “what captivated me was the immensities in which this little place is wrapped”. It was not enough, however, to fill a “diary of intoxication” with Aran. He yearned for a way to contribute to the island and so began work on a map of it at the suggestion of the island postmistress to assist tourists visiting a simple bare place but with richness attached to even “the tiniest fragment of reality”.

We’ve become much more aware of the immensities of little places and the tiniest fragments in recent weeks; partly because we have no choice but also because we have more time to look so closely at what is beside us. We are all islanders for a while and, interestingly, Robinson found something “compulsive in one’s relationship to an island ... it is as if the surrounding ocean like a magnifying glass directs an intensified vision on to the narrow field of view. A little piece is cut out of the world, marked off in fact by its richness in significance.”

Robinson, often in partnership with his wife Maireád, sought to do justice to that by unwrapping the immensities, researching in minute detail and seeking to answer questions, such as why did the wren flourish on one side of the island and the raven on the other?

His books included Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986), Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995) and Connemara (1990). Robinson’s personal archive in NUI Galway underlines the depth of his research and the scale of his achievement in seeking to map Aran and some of the other western islands, including Inishbofin and Inishark. He investigated the origins of place names, monuments and small island landmarks, with detailed map work and information from locals, his densely packed index cards supplemented with wider context as he devoured topographical dictionaries, statistical surveys, histories of archdioceses long out of print and academic debates about Cromwellian fortifications. He acknowledged it might have been “tempting” to reach conclusions based on partial stories or fragments but “even a pilgrimage narrow-mindedly devoted to one end is endlessly ambushed and seduced by the labyrinth it winds through”.

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Pilgrim

He also wrote like a gifted novelist with a marvellous turn of phrase and mixed empathy with frankness. He did not shy away from social and class tensions – “the sidelong glance of envy and malicious supposition”– and wrote of the hazardous life of the cliff men of the islands, the “cragmen” who descended the cliffs, lowered down on a cable around their middle held by four or five others, to hunt seabirds, the killing often done with bare hands: “In the summer of 1816 two unfortunate men, engaged in this frightful occupation of cragman, missed their footing and were instantly dashed to pieces”. An atheist (“I trust prayer no more than whiskey”), he nonetheless celebrated Earth with an almost religious fervour and saw his task as akin to that of a Catholic pilgrim with the features he highlighted taking the role of stations.

In the aftermath of crises in the past, practical support for artists has crumbled as something supposedly non-essential

Such was Robinson’s range that he could be described as historical geographer, ecologist, environmentalist, natural historian, botanist and translator. As critic John Wilson Foster saw it, there were “global and cosmic” aspirations to his thinking and central to that was the idea of “living well on Earth and finding our way back to the world”. Therein lies the relevance of his legacy for what we are enduring now, and how we can try to make something positive of it; seeing nature as anchor, as consolation, as a reminder of the damage that has been done to our hinterland by our relentless pursuit of everything we thought was important, but are now questioning.

Mixed signals

We also need to confront the mixed signals that are sent to artists at a time of crisis. Understandably, there has been a reaching for Derek Mahon (“There will be dying, there will be dying/but there is no need to go into that/Everything is going to be alright”), or Seamus Heaney (“if we winter this one out, we can summer everywhere”), but in the aftermath of crises in the past, practical support for artists has crumbled as something supposedly non-essential. Reflecting on the legacy of our civil war almost a century ago, writer George Russell (AE) wondered what the lessons of trauma were. One of them, he suggested, was profoundly dispiriting: that the new Ireland had “hardly deflected a hair’s breadth from the old cultural lines”.

We need, after this crisis, to sustain the old lines we have rediscovered and the new ones we have found.