Author: ivanpope

Alone at A*

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I was always alone at A* but I wanted to be a tour guide, to gather others around me and walk with them and tell them stories, to show them the edges, the hinterland, the connective tissue, the limina, the penumbric spaces.
I wasn’t interested in the flora, I passed over it without seeing, without noticing. Did birds sing in Birkenau? I can’t say, I didn’t hear them but that may be because I never thought to listen. I was interested in the birches, the trees from which Birkenau took its name.
I was changing and was changed by A*, it tugged at my roots.
I walked over it as it slumbered in the soil, dug in, holding fast against modernity.

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Stones of Arran

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Tim Robinson didn’t invent deep mapping but he refined it to the nth degree with The Stones of Arran.

Here’s an interview with him.

Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, the first volume of Tim Robinson’s comprehensive account of Árainn, the largest of the Irish Aran Islands, was first published in 1985, followed in 1995 by Stones of Aran: Labyrinth. It was not, however, till the reprinting of the volumes in 2008 and 2009 respectively that the books really began to gain traction, establishing Tim’s reputation as one of the greatest living chroniclers of landscape. His more recent oeuvre includes several books about Connemara, also in the west of Ireland. Now ten years on from the re-issue of Pilgrimage we are pleased to feature on the blog a previously unpublished interview with Tim, carried out via email in May 2014 by Land Lines research team member Pippa Marland.

Adequacy is for archangels: an interview with Tim Robinson