Tim Robinson: Delicately mapping the junction of the past and the future
Tim Robinson's new life in London couldn't be more different to Connemara, but the celebrated writer and cartographer is still as illuminating in person as he is on paper, finds Hilary A White
If things go the way we fear they might, this will be my last complication-free trip to the UK. I'm in London to meet the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, and much as you wish it wasn't, the 'B-word' is inescapable during the taxi journey through the Irish borough of Kilburn with a worried Bulgarian cabbie ("we'll probably move home if it goes through").
This is probably as Hibernian as London gets, from the Irish names over the pub windows to the framed Pat Ingoldsby poem mysteriously hanging on the wall of the greasy spoon where I go over my notes.
The warm translucence of Tim Robinson at the hall door of a quiet terrace offers a counterpoint that feels valuable to the political bickering, of the things that are possible when you're allowed to move where your curiosity and ambitions dictate, and of the sizeable contribution an outsider can make.
Robinson is "up and down" these days, he says this sunny morning. London, the city he once traipsed as a regular on its vibrant art scene, is now home once again after almost half a century living in the west of Ireland. The life he and wife Mairead (herself of London-Irish stock) lead could not be more different to that of Roundstone or Aran.
"Take us as you find us," had been the advice from Mairead when I rang ahead a night or two earlier. She is referring to the Parkinson's disease that her husband was diagnosed with just months after Mairead herself had a health scare. The couple were settling back into life in West Hampstead when she took ill, a discovery that Robinson writes about with terrifying clarity in his new collection, Experiments On Reality.
"When we were living in Connemara - we are still living in Connemara, I have to remind myself - we would come across here to London in the winter for a few weeks just to avoid some of the worst of the damp and downpours," he says. "We loved it and we loved the London life, particularly going to art galleries. But then about three years ago Mairead fell ill while we were here. And then a few months later while I'd been looking after her, a couple of friends were over and one said, 'Tim's not looking good'. And Tim wasn't looking good."
Illness has grounded the couple in London ever since, "a long quiet period" from which they "never got going again". While he hopes they get back into the habit of going for walks to galleries and along the Thames, he admits it might be difficult.
Of all the people for whom the idea of being immobile seems absurd, Robinson stands out. Coming to the west of Ireland in 1972, the region's "near unmappability" was a red rag to his bullish curiosity. Over decades, in every weather imaginable, he proceeded to walk thousands of kilometres of Aran, the Burren and Connemara, that "ABC of earth wonders" where the "modalities of beauty, antiquity and strangeness" congealed via his bewitching, jewel-studded maps. It seems unfair that we should have got him, that the world at large shouldn't have an army of Robinsons tracing and cataloguing local topographies and the rich heritages of place and people. Were they the only outcome of his tenure, those Folding Landscapes maps (now collector's items and adorning the walls of this very sitting room) that he painstakingly paced out with black ink and white paper would be a remarkable legacy.
But a polymath's work is never done. Robinson was also alchemising these deep topographical immersions into prose. The results were dense, illuminating and spectacular.
The two-volume Stones of Aran is described simply as a "masterpiece" by author and academic John Elder in the introduction to a New York Review reprint. "It is hard to think of another author in the literature of place who has managed to combine such intricacy and precision in the mapping of his home terrain with such a passionate, questing voice."
Influential nature writer Robert Macfarlane, meanwhile, dubbed Robinson's award-winning Connemara trilogy "one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English".
While Robinson's achievements on the page have made him a revered presence in academia (he maintains strong links with NUI Galway, to whom he bequeathed 85 boxes of archive material), and an Aosdana member since 1996, there's another level of esteem further west again. After you pass Oughterard and wind yourself through the blanket bogs and Bens of Connemara, something hushed usually reserved for mystics or gurus attaches to his name.
Naturally, he laughs off such talk. He recalls two young poets arriving at their home in Roundstone ("It was great how people would turn up at our doorstep"), and how one asked as they were leaving if Robinson knew how highly regarded he was. "I said, 'No, I don't. I don't know that.' And it's probably a good thing that I don't. But I gather occasionally that it is so, and that's very, very nice."
He certainly makes for sagacious, engaging company, with everything told through a purr of weathered eloquence. But the 84-year-old is also quite hilarious, eagerly recounting memories of divilment and mayhem witnessed in tousled locals and other indigenous fauna.
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He started out believing he'd need two things to map Connemara: fluency in Irish and a car. The former went splendidly, the couple's 12 years on Aran equipping them with a language I overhear them using today while making the tea.
The latter, however, forms the basis of a long and delectable anecdote involving the shortest and most shambolic failed driving test in Galway motoring history. (With debates raging about the dearth of public transport in rural Ireland, spare a thought for the Robinsons, who managed carless their whole lives). "Working on it!" is the octogenarian's quip when I ask about his "interminable adolescence" he mentions in Experiments on Reality.
The two worlds of north-west London and 'the west' are so different that there isn't actually any conflict between them, he reasons, adding that he was "ready for a change". But he misses the west. It rings clearly as he shares yarns about Burren days exploring lost limestone valleys choked with hazel or the wildlife he noticed the last time he went blackberrying up the back of Roundstone village.
Mind you, even the hardiest of souls would need a break after almost half a century clinging on in wind-lashed south Connemara. There is "a weight" to the place, he says, tacking on a philosophical shrug to indicate that it's merely the price you pay.
"Although the storms are occasionally difficult to handle, nevertheless they're so dramatic," he beams. "I remember somebody giving me a lift home late one night, and we drove down in his car on to the quayside. The waves were breaking at the gap in the quayside wall, and surging through and under the car. It was dark and it was wild, and I thought, 'this is marvellous, to be living there just above it'. Which makes you endlessly tolerant of floods and mopping up of saltwater and drying out of books!"
Floods were a visitor he and Mairead learned to share their waterside home with during their many years in Roundstone. There were other floods too, he recalls of life in that "world capital of rainbows", inpourings of light and euphoria.
"It's just so beautiful," he gasps quietly, lost in a view he says comes to him often and that he and Mairead enjoy describing to each other. "The views from the big windows upstairs… shortly after we moved in, as each room was repaired we moved our mattress around until we were back where we started in the big room at the top of the house. There was a full moon, and I remember lying on our mattress by the window overlooking the bay. The full moon would be reflected in the seawater, every little wave recorded and cast on to our ceiling as we lay there, and these ripples ran down the length of the room. Magical experience."
There are plans to eventually do something with the building in Roundstone so that it may continue to be a hub for creativity and thought and design in Robinson's absence. "It's an exciting building to be in. That long room upstairs has all sorts of magic associated with it. I don't know how much to go into these plans because we're both ill at the moment. I say 'at the moment'… I don't know how all this is going to work out in the future."
Experiments on Reality offers another side to Robinson. The abstract and algebraic thinking of his early years as both a mathematician and artist bubble back to the surface and meld with the mossy scents of Connacht and the reflections of age. There are childhood memories of his grandmother's antique shop (he likes the idea that he too would end up rediscovering, polishing up and displaying lost treasures for a living). There are musty Polaroids of his youth in Yorkshire, and thoughtful musings on his time as a maths teacher in Istanbul and the move he and Mairead subsequently made to Vienna to pursue visual art.
The book concludes with A Land Without Shortcuts, an essay Robinson delivered as the Parnell Lecture in 2011 at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In it, he expresses horror at the human implications of climate change on the land he is so woven into. As leader of the Save Roundstone Bog Campaign, he was at the coalface of efforts to stop developments on these precious ecosystems in the late 1990s. While accepting that the environment is now further up the list of social priority, he still fears for the region.
"I do worry," he says. "And I resent that I had to stray into that particular mode of writing. Why should I be forced into writing in a particular way just because some bastard wants to build a big house right slap in the middle of the view, or wants to start a scheme for pumping water up into the hills to drive turbines? Wonderful idea! I also resented it because it forced one to think that way when you began walking out into the countryside."
At another point in our conversation, he worries for the fate of a "charming" cottage he remembers in the Burren where he would leave his bike when exploring a remote valley. "I daren't go back to see what's happened to it. It's probably been bulldozed to hell. The Burren is taking heavy damage."
A Land Without Shortcuts segues into a discussion on the role of place-names and how their preservation can be a "first defence against neglect or exploitation". "Among the historical roots of Ireland's carelessness of place is the retreat of its language and the accompanying anglicisation of its placenames... to undo a little of this damage has been for me, an Englishman, a work of reparation."
The future has never seemed less certain, with all kinds of finite resources - environmental, diplomatic, literary - seeming more precious than ever from this flat in London.
"At the moment our position is such a strange one it would take acres to make it comprehensible," Robinson chuckles softly as he considers this new tempo to life. "Maybe I should write a short book about my time in the Burren. I don't know if I've got the right amount of material or lifespan or energy, but I can feel the shape of a book so something should be doable. There were of course times when it rained and rained and rained. But then there were other times that were utterly, utterly magical."
Experiments on Reality by Tim Robinson is published by Penguin Ireland, €16.99
