Catherine Marshall investigates Robinson’s relationship with other visual cultures in Ireland. Marshall places Robinson and his earlier persona Drever in a visual context of the west of Ireland, alongside other Irish artists such as Paul Henry and Seán Keating, inviting speculation on the artist as voyeur or social activist, on the relationship between images and words, and between art and power. Although Robinson’s maps and writings serve as typical entry points into his work, Marshall explores how they also function as artwork.

Patrick Duffy examines Robinson’s approach to representing the sense of place encountered in the landscapes around Galway Bay. For forty years Robinson has been committed to a minutely-detailed exploration of the rocky outposts of the Aran islands, the Burren and Connemara, all of which are ancient landscapes deeply incised with the marks and memories of human occupation for more than two thousand years. In a world of collapsing distances and faster, more wide-ranging travel, Duffy argues that Robinson’s works in map and text illustrate the potential and possibilities in a reversion to ‘slow’ landscapes. In this respect, Robinson’s ‘endless proliferation of detours’ on foot and bicycle, has permitted a more intimate engagement with nature, environment and community.

The collection ends appropriately with a poem by Andrew McNeillie that he wrote about Robinson. Furthering the creative process, McNeillie, who is both a literary critic and creative writer, diverges from the critical essay form and offers a creative reflection of Robinson’s relationship with the landscape and mapping upon his arrival to Ireland through poetic form.

Eamonn Wall explores the methodology and reach of Robinson’s work. Even though Robinson is not connected to the academy, his work exemplifies the idea of interdisciplinarity. Wall argues that Robinson has moved slowly and respectfully, allowing him to undertake many avenues of inquiry to great effect that continues to remain relevant in Irish Studies.

Moya Cannon offers a reading of ‘Orion the Hunter’, a work of short fiction dedicated to Robinson’s late friend John Moriarty. Rather than formulate an argument about Robinson, Cannon’s own poetic sensibilities push her exploration, by way of ‘Orion’, into the ways in which Robinson developed as a cartographer, writer and cultural figure in Ireland.

Over the years, Robinson’s writings have incisively documented what he calls the ‘ABC of earth wonders’ – Aran Islands, Burren, and Connemara. During this process Robinson has addressed the historical and geographical tensions that suffuse the Irish western landscape. However, attempting to place any sort of label on Robinson presents the largest challenge in a collection of essays devoted to his topographical writings and mapmaking. The aim, then, is not to define Robinson in some absolute binding way but, rather, to unfold the intricacies of the places that define his work and in so doing reveal his substantial influence on contemporary Irish culture. Christine Cusick and Derek Gladwin begin by offering an overview of Robinson’s work and demonstrate the need for such a collection since critical attention on Robinson’s work has gained momentum in the last several years. They then more closely investigate Robinson in two broad sections: one about his cartography and writing, and the other about the ways in which the writers in this collection engage with his work.

‘Catchment’ is the word by which Tim Robinson designates a unit of the Earth’s surface bounded by higher edges and within which springs, rainfall and smaller tributaries converge, in most cases flowing onward to an outlet that joins it to a more broadly encompassing drainage. Every point on the Earth’s surface is mapped in such a way by elevation and the movement of water. In Listening to the Wind, the first volume of his Connemara trilogy, Robinson further characterises a catchment as ‘an open, self-renewing system, supporting and supported by a vast number of life-forms and all their interrelations’. Across the seasons and over the decades, Robinson has walked the catchments near his home in Connemara. In this essay John Elder argues that not only has Robinson come to know the catchments in intimate detail, but he has also tracked their confluence with the geology, language and history of western Ireland.

Karen Babine argues that the genre of ‘creative nonfiction’, or the Montaignaian essay, is largely missing in the Irish context. Babine maintains that Robinson and Arthur represent two exceptions of creative nonfiction writers who are still thriving, and who both operate almost exclusively in the nonfiction genre (though each has published small exceptions in fiction and poetry).

This chapter begins by setting out a basis for understanding the mad papers with reference to some of the existing approaches that have been taken in discussing them. The mad papers conclude with the remarkable Paper X, made up of bits of quotation printed by Samuel Richardson at haphazard angles on the page. The most detailed engagement with the 'content' of Paper X is an article by Michael E. Connaughton on the sources of its quotations. Clarissa's replacement of William Shakespeare's 'blurs the grace' with 'blots the face' is a misquotation found in Edward Bysshe, but the excision of 'calls virtue a hypocrite' is Richardson's own. The chapter makes specific case studies of three of Paper X's quotations from Thomas Otway, William Shakespeare and Abraham Cowley to demonstrate the effect the logic of quotation is to be put to in this tragic phase of the novel.