Briton’s maps reflect love for the landscape

Briton’s maps reflect love for the landscape

Inis Mór, Aran Islands, Ireland • Photo by Sonse (CC BY 2.0)

Originally published 14 September 2019

Lis­doon­va­r­na, Ire­land — A map is an invi­ta­tion into a land­scape. The maps of British car­tog­ra­ph­er Tim Robin­son are irre­sistible invitations.

Robin­son lives and works in the west of Ire­land. Dur­ing the past 15 years, he has com­plet­ed maps of the Aran Islands, the Bur­ren of Coun­ty Clare, and the coast of Con­nemara, three parts of Ire­land renowned for their nat­ur­al beau­ty. His care­ful­ly craft­ed maps not only express the phys­i­cal geog­ra­phy of a region; they also some­how mag­i­cal­ly evoke what they can’t describe — the tex­ture of the rock under­foot, the feel of the wind, the sound of the birds, the lan­guage and cul­ture of the people.

Tim Robin­son is that rarest of birds, a pri­vate car­tog­ra­ph­er whose work rivals the nation­al map­ping agen­cies in scale and detail. And he brings to his craft what the nation­al map­ping agen­cies can­not — an intense per­son­al involve­ment with the land­scape. His maps are first-rate exam­ples of sci­en­tif­ic car­tog­ra­phy, and they are equal­ly suc­cess­ful as works of art.

Robin­son came to car­tog­ra­phy in a round­about way. He stud­ied math­e­mat­ics at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, and worked as a teacher and artist in Istan­bul, Vien­na, and Lon­don. In 1972 he came to the Aran Islands in the west of Ire­land and fell into map­ping serendip­i­tous­ly. No good tourist map of the islands was avail­able, and the local post­mistress sug­gest­ed that he might fill the need. He had, he says, “a hand for the draw­ing, an ear for the pla­ce­names, and legs for the boreens [lit­tle roads].”

Robin­son is a drafts­man with a deft and del­i­cate hand. He uti­lized as guides satel­lite pho­tographs sup­plied by the Ord­nance Sur­vey of Ire­land. But what make his work unique is some­thing that can­not be derived by what con­tem­po­rary car­tog­ra­phers call “remote sens­ing.” They are legs for the boreens and an ear for the pla­ce­names that are Robin­son’s spe­cial gifts.

Every name a story

In places like the west of Ire­land, every field, every rock, every cleft in the cliff has a name, and every name a sto­ry. The study of pla­ce­names led Robin­son deep into Irish lan­guage and cul­ture. He became a schol­ar of the human and nat­ur­al his­to­ries of the land­scapes he mapped. He spent time with the old peo­ple of each region and lis­tened to their tales. And he devised ways to include a remark­able amount of this infor­ma­tion on his maps and in the gen­er­ous mar­gin­al notes that accom­pa­ny them.

Any map, of course, must leave out far more than in includes. Here is Robin­son in the intro­duc­tion to his map of the Aran Islands: 

As I write I think of details far beyond the pow­ers of res­o­lu­tion of this map — a lit­tle field called An Duga, the dock, because it is shaped like a Gal­way har­bor, anoth­er called Din­gle because its soil came from [the Din­gle Penin­su­la in] Ker­ry as bal­last in boats com­ing for kelp, a third called Móinín an Damh­sa, the lit­tle mead­ow of the danc­ing, because some­one saw the fairies danc­ing there… In count­less pla­ce­names the web of stone has caught some­thing of the words of those gen­er­a­tions, who were hard-pressed that all their toil left them pos­sess­ing noth­ing — scarce­ly a musi­cal instru­ment, a cart for sea­weed or a boat to fish this teem­ing sea — noth­ing but the imma­te­r­i­al arts they were so rich in, of talk and song.”

Ire­land is a par­tic­u­lar­ly suit­able envi­ron­ment for the inde­pen­dent car­tog­ra­ph­er with an ear for the talk and the song. The first sys­tem­at­ic maps of the coun­try were drawn by British engi­neers who gen­er­al­ly did not speak the Irish lan­guage and cared lit­tle for the cul­ture. In count­less cas­es they sim­ply wrote down pla­ce­names as they heard them, and the results sel­dom matched real­i­ty. For exam­ple, “The Wood of the Berries,” in Irish Fidh na gcaer, is ren­dered on the maps as Vine­gar. Many such Eng­lish abom­i­na­tions still clut­ter Irish maps.

Colonial mappers

Robin­son’s maps make clear how impor­tant it is that a car­tog­ra­ph­er be in sym­pa­thy with the lan­guage and cul­ture of the place he maps. Much of the world, includ­ing most of the so-called Third World, was mapped in the days of empire by car­tog­ra­phers of the great colo­nial pow­ers. Those maps may have ade­quate­ly served the needs of empire, but they often obscured or cor­rupt­ed a rich lega­cy of indige­nous culture.

To recov­er the wealth of local cul­ture implic­it in pla­ce­names, the car­tog­ra­ph­er must be some­thing of a lin­guist, his­to­ri­an, arche­ol­o­gist, and per­haps, like Robin­son, a bit of the poet.

There are ample oppor­tu­ni­ties for sen­si­tive inde­pen­dent car­tog­ra­phers to ply a suc­cess­ful trade in many parts of the world. How valu­able it would be, for exam­ple, to have a Robin­son-like map of Cape Cod, sen­si­tive to the pre­colo­nial cul­ture of the Native Amer­i­cans and to the unique geol­o­gy and nat­ur­al his­to­ry of that region.

Tim Robin­son’s maps do hon­or to the land­scapes they describe. As invi­ta­tions, they irre­sistibly beck­on the arche­ol­o­gist, botanist, geol­o­gist, bird-watch­er, folk­lorist, stu­dent of the Irish lan­guage, or just plain tourist. The maps have won design awards in Britain and Europe, and have been praised by artists and sci­en­tists alike. One hopes they will become bet­ter known and inspire sim­i­lar efforts elsewhere.


Online ver­sions of Tim Robin­son’s maps of the Aran Islands, the Bur­ren, and Con­nemara are avail­able at NUI Gal­way Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions. ‑Ed.

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