STONES OF ARAN: Pilgrimage by Tim...

STONES OF ARAN: Pilgrimage by Tim Robinson (Penguin: $8.95, illustrated). Robinson takes the reader on a meditative walking tour of Aran, the largest of three tiny islands in Galway Bay. As he traces its rocky circumference, he reflects on Aran’s history and geography, and the etymology of the place-names in one of the last regions where people still speak Irish, “the irreplaceable distillate of over two thousand years’ experience of this country, which has been poured down the drains in the rest of Ireland but which was carried unspilt even through the famine century in those few little cups, the western Gaeltachtai of Aran, Connemara and parts of Donegal and Kerry.” Some of the tiny bays and cliffs take their names from mundane details--ruins, land owners, shipwrecks; others draw on the folkloric deeds of the capall fharraige , or sea-horses, that were believed to inhabit the surrounding waters. Robinson seeks the essence of an increasingly distant Celtic past within the resonant syllables of these names, like a visitor peering through the warped and colored glass of an ancient church window.