Tim Robinson was talking with the village blacksmith, Micilin an Gabha, shortly after he and his wife had moved from London to the Aran Islands, quite some time ago. One of the first remarks the smith made to them was that the wild geese flying southwards over the island (Arainn) in the autumn make every letter of the alphabet in the sky: first a huge A, then a B, and then, as he put it "a burst of them" make a C. He thought this was remarkable, since those geese had never been to school.
"I would have thought it remarkable, too, but the best I ever saw the wild geese do in all the autumns we spent in Aran was the occasional sinead fada, the stroke marking a long vowel in Irish writing." (He was lecturing to an American audience.) "But the idea of the skies teaching us the language remained with me. The Irish language as an emanation of the land of Ireland, of that segment of the earth's surface and its moody skies, is the theme I want to explore tonight." Question by Y: there was an element of banter maybe in the words of the smith, but was he perhaps suggesting, maybe unconsciously, the thoughts so well expressed by Hubert Reeves, the astrophysicist who, after a serious illness, began to take a close interest in birds. In his book Oiseaux, merveilleux oiseaux (not yet in English, it seems), he showed us what wonderful creatures they are. A goose can go from Canada (Reeves's country) to South America, and land on the same patch for breeding as it did the year before. He makes the point - or the bird does for him - that before mankind learned to navigate with a compass, the birds were ahead of us.
Could the smith on Aran have had some inkling of the brainwork, instinct, whatever you call it, that brought birds to and fro across oceans, and that he was simply colouring up the theory with his surmise that the birds, in spite of their lack of schooling, an ironic thought, could be as clever or more so than ourselves, mankind?
Robinson was, he confesses, at this time collecting Irish placenames before he could understand Irish. He asked an old man the name of a certain well and he told him it was Tobar an Asail, the well of the donkey. Then the old man added: "Thit asal isteach ann fado [A donkey fell into it long ago]."
"It was the first sentence of spoken Irish, outside the classrooms of Irish courses, that I completely understood. Thit asal isteach ann fado. As dense and foursquare as a limestone block, a stone from the ruins of the past . . . the voice of history itself, telling how all things fall."
We all know what Tim Robinson has done since those days in his writing and his mapmaking. This from Set- ting Foot on the Shores of Connema- ra and other writings. Lilliput Press 1996.