Robert Macfarlane on how Tim Robinson read messages from history in Aran limestone
The history of the British Isles could be well told through its five great rocks — granite, sandstone, slate, chalk, and limestone. There are others, of course: schist, shale, basalt, the clays. But these five form a strong mineral pentangle within which the islands and their pasts are contained.
Each of these rocks has its character, and each its literary keepers.
Granite is Ted Hughes's stone, and that of DH Lawrence in Kangaroo.
Chalk belongs to the southern downlanders: EM Forster, GK Chesterton, Gilbert White.
Sandstone to Hugh Miller.
Slate to Jim Perrin, Caradog Prichard, Kate Roberts.
Limestone has been blessed with two exceptional 20th-century writers. The first of these is WH Auden, who so loved the high karst shires of the northern Pennines. What most moved Auden about limestone was the way it eroded. Limestone is soluble in water, which means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear. Thus the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a metaphysical as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone a very human honesty — an acknowledgement that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.
The second of the great limestone writers is Tim Robinson. On the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare, between the granite of Galway and the sandstones of Liscannor, rises a vast limestone escarpment, pewterish in colour on a dull day, silver in sunshine. The limestone begins in the area of north-west Clare known as The Burren — from the Gaelic boireann, meaning "rocky place". From there it extends in a north-west direction, dipping beneath the Atlantic, to resurge thirty miles offshore as three islands: Árainn, Inis Meáin, and Inis Oírr — or the Aran Islands, as they are also called.
