Stones of Aran

Obviously, it takes a somewhat rum fellow, a mathematician and an artist and cartographer, to settle down and become a denizen on a few relatively barren, sparsely populated limestone rocks off the west coast of Ireland, to do so and to write a book exploring the minutiae of the language, folklore, history, geology, archaeology of said outcrops whilst making what he is pleased to call a "pilgrimage" around the perimeters of them.The results of this pilgrimage range from the pedantic to the poetic.

Tim Robinson could write about almost any subject and it would be a pleasure to read his erudite product. That he wrote this book about Aran is an extraordinarily fortunate event for us.

Tim Robinson published this account of the largest of the three islands that sit at the entrance to Galway Bay, "Arainn" in the island's own speech, in 1986. He had gone to live there in 1972, and this book is the remarkable distillation of his experience, as well as his exploration of its past.