Points on the compass

TUCKED away discreetly in an empty corner of many maps is something called the compass rose, a nominal diagram of possible lines of departure. "Its meagre petals," as Tim Robinson says, "are a conventional selection of the transfinity of directions radiating from the self to the terrain. It is a skeletal flower, befitting our starved spatial consciousness."

For 20 years now, Robinson's writings have nourished the compass rose until this "exiguous mystic bloom", doubled and redoubled in its petals, suggests almost infinite ways of experiencing the landscape. In his masterwork, the two volumes of Stones of Aran, in assorted essays and fragments, and in his own maps of Aran, the Burren and Connemara, he has led our imaginations ever deeper into a near Proustian labyrinth of things to see, feel and know.

The title essay of this book was written, he says, as a private, memorandum, meant to convey the strangeness of his experiences while walking the tangled coastline of south Connemara. It was carried off by Lilliput's Antony Farrell to appear as a pamphlet in 1984 - an early, signal of the potent and original mind that was to transform our perceptions of "scenery".

A central mystery in the essay is the small but profound adventure of walking out to an island at low tide. This is one of the topographical sensations which reward the traveller with "privileged moments of spatial awareness" (another occurs on the saddle of a pass as one crosses from one valley to another).

Awoken by an insight of Robinson's, it is hard to doze again. His essay, "A Connemara Fractal", leads the reader through some of the protean logistics of map making (cycling out in the rain from a handy b&b) and on into the Mandelbrot mathematics that demonstrate the futility of measuring in ever finer detail. Thanks to this essay (once acted out for me in front of a documentary film camera), any corner of a rock pool can repeat the coastline of a continent in successive reduction to infinity.

In that documentary, too (Folding Landscapes, made with David Cabot for RTE), whole passages of Robinson, read by himself, were, matched to explorations of his landscapes - a device which brought out the mesmeric rhythm and power of his writing (also, its glee). Thus, reading some of these pieces, I can hear again that rapt, meticulous voice.

Several of the essays originate, indeed, in past invitations to give a talk - a sure guarantee of something fascinating.

To the Prehistoric Society, his story of discovering an alignment of boulders in a valley in the Twelve, Bens; revisited on midwinter's eve, they point precisely at the sun setting into the cleft between two peaks. Holy wells, schell middens, filachta fiadh - quartering the last empty spaces of the west, Robinson has enriched the record with so many unsuspected details.

To the Botanical Society of the British Isles, persuaded to hold their AGM in Roundstone, he presented a "cultural ecology" of the rare species of heather on Roundstone Bog, and how, in the row over the airport scheme, Erica mackaiana became the symbol of "obscurantist and incomprehensible intellectuals" like himself.

To an Irish studies audience in New York, he offered the idea of hearing the Irish language "as if it were spoken by the landscape": dissertations on words such as cloch, "a solid, lumpy, two fistful of sound", or scalpracliai, the word for a fissure in limestone with a resonance inseparable from Aran.

Robinson began collecting placenames on Aran before he knew a word of the language. To J.M. Synge, listening through the floorboards to a murmur of Gaelic, the language of the seagulls seemed easier to learn. Arriving at the reprint of Robinson's introduction for the Penguin edition of Synge's The Aran Islands, one looks hopefully for some interaction from him with John Millington's experience.

But he never relaxes, as it were, when Synge's around. He notes as "depressingly unobservant" the comment that "On these rocks, where there is no growth of animal or vegetable life, all the seasons are the same" but then winces (in Stones of Aran: Labyrinth) about condescending to Synge over an Irish name for a plant: "I am caught out in a petty rivalrousness. As if Synge, with his deep, intuitive eyes, cares whether or not I have more facts on Aran than he!"

His essay on Synge is scholarly, appreciative and often moving: a positive bonus to the hook. But its fastidious objectivity soon makes one realise how much of Robinson's spell depends on his own magnetic presence; the genius loci.

To coincide with Setting Foot he publishes (Folding Landscapes, Roundstone) a new and updated version of Oileain Arann, his map of the Aran Islands, and a 96 page companion that summarises (in English) the islands' history and elucidates 600 odd placenames. Whether or not you intend a visit, these are cards of identity that belong in every cultivated Irish home.