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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Robert Macfarlane (Goodreads Author)

4.16 · Rating details · 6,585 ratings · 949 reviews

Robert Macfarlane travels Britain's ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, underappreciated landscape.

Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ...more

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Hardcover, 433 pages

Published June 7th 2012 by Hamish Hamilton

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British and Irish Nature Writing

205 books — 141 voters

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

Novels for the Wanderer

149 books — 196 voters

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Average rating 4.16 ·

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· 6,585 ratings · 949 reviews

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Sep 08, 2014 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, history, memoir, tibet, travel, spain, nature, israel, england, environment

This one really hit the sweet spot for me. It gets you tuned into walking journeys all over the U.K. with side trips in Spain, Palestine, and Tibet. Lyrical presentations of the author’s sensory experiences with the geography and the flora and fauna are harnessed as a gateway to history of the particular paths he took and the inspired outlooks of people who have thought deeply about the affinity of the human mind and civilization to walking in general and connectedness to the land.

I have long be ...more

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Jun 23, 2016 Petra-X Off having adventures rated it liked it

Shelves: reviewed, 2016-150-reviews, travel-adventure-countries, 2016-read, misc-reference

I didn't enjoy this book at all. I thought it was as boring as it was well-written. Walking isn't a subject that interests me much, but the location and history of the walks does. There was too much about the minutae of the walks - long lists of every kind of plant and a thesaurusful of synonyms. The author is in love with words for words sake. I'm not, I like the words to go somewhere, and these didn't for me.

Written whilst reading the book.(view spoiler) ...more

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Dec 22, 2013 Kelly rated it really liked it

Shelves: its-the-quiet-ones, owned, philosophy-theory-criticism, worlds-lost-dead-and-dying, romantical, 21st-century

"'We picked the path up at the edge of the cloud cover that day,' she said, 'and then we stepped into the mist under the mountain and the rest of the world was lost.'"

Robert MacFarlane is a Cambridge professor of modern English literature. However, he happens to be much better known for his secondary profession- his travel writing on the interactions between landscapes and human personalities. He is interested in how we are affected by the landscapes that we travel in and, even more so:

"how peo ...more

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Dec 05, 2017 Zanna rated it it was ok · review of another edition

What I like about this is that it helps me to see the land and the biosphere, feel the land and its life in my body, to relate myself to the land, even in memory, and in the future. As Naomi Klein puts it in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, love will save this place. And for many of Robert's fellow British, who have been (what Klein, again, calls) rootless consumers for most of our lives, feeling connected to the land (other than in a proprietorial or nationalistic way I gues ...more

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May 01, 2013 Richard Newton rated it really liked it

Shelves: walking, travel-and-the-world

To begin with I found this a disappointing read. I expected to be impressed and enthralled - I love mountains, I love walking, and I like erudite writing, but I found this a little difficult to get into. The writing flows, but the contents don't always work. I think this is because Macfarlane quotes from too many different sources, and it seems as if he is wanting to show you all the clever stuff he has read without saying anything himself. If you find this I say persevere, because it settles do ...more

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Nov 21, 2014 Lyn Elliott rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, autobiography-memoir, environment, memory, landscape

This is a wonderful book. Superbly written, reflective, illuminating on connections between people, places, journeys and times. A treasure.
As Macfarlane himself wrote in the Author's note: 'It tells the story of walking a thousand miles or more along the old ways in search of a route to the past, only to find myself delivered again and again to the contemporary' (p364).

It is not just about walking, journeys on foot. One surprising journey was sailing, on ancient sea roads which, he writes, 'are ...more

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Jan 04, 2020 Malia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

This was my first book by Macfarlane, and my first book of this decade, and a good start on both fronts. I really enjoyed his style of writing, which felt immersive, though the pace of the book was sedate. I love walking myself, it is, for me, one of the most meditative things I can think to do, and The Old ways is a sort of ode to the practice. Definitely curious to read Macfarlane's much-praised newest book Underland soon!'

Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com ...more

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Dec 26, 2012 Fiona rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nature-writing, travel-writing

No hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Translation: There is no road, the road is made by walking. Antonio Machado

There are so many outstanding reviews of this book that there is little, if anything, new for me to say. Robert MacFarlane’s prose is as luscious as ever. He writes of the lore of pathways, of those who wrote just as eloquently about them, in particular Edward Thomas; he walks on the moor paths of the Isle of Lewis and sails the sea roads off its coast, walks across the Lairig Ghru

...more

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Dec 15, 2012 Ken rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, finished-in-2015, nonfiction

MacFarlane has some poetry to his credit and it shows. Of course this is not surprising, as he is a travel writer, and travel writers are all about description... imagery, in other words. They are our planes, trains, and automobiles, bound to get us there. And, in this case, once there, McFarlane asks that we walk by his side and listen as he identifies the rocks, trees, birds, cloud types, and historical back stories. These are the "old ways," the foot paths -- the link, if you will, to our anc ...more

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Dec 05, 2017 Mir rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: travel

This was an interesting and well-written book. The author clearly love words and is frequently intoxicated by them.

I enjoyed the first half more than the second. His familiarity with and attention to the details of the local is wonderful. Later, when he travels Abroad and clearly does not have a feel for the terrain or its history, it was not so great. And I could have done without the long biographical section on Thomas.

Just a passing comment, as this is not a concern of the book: I found it a ...more

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Nov 15, 2019 Sonja rated it it was amazing

Shelves: ha-read-from-tbr

I loved this book! So well written. It was almost hypnotic to read. No real action or drama but you just feel good while reading it!

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Jan 13, 2013 Karen Charbonneau rated it it was amazing

My criteria for giving a book five stars is that during the day I think on what I've read, and look forward to continuing my adventure with the author at the end of day; and the writing must be good. MacFarlane's writing is lyrical and masculine, too. Maps? You don't need maps; he's not writing a guide book for you, but inviting you to come along with him over old and ancient paths. Why would he recommend you walk the treacherous Broomway, where incoming tides over foggy quicksand have drowned h ...more

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Jun 21, 2019 Marc rated it liked it

Shelves: geology, walking, hiking, nature

‘There is no road, the road is made by walking’ Antonio Machado

It's bad luck for Robert Macfarlane that I read his book immediately after The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, which is characterized by its purity and depth. Macfarlane regularly refers to Shepherd and he also wrote a nice preface in the reissue of her book. But "The Old Ways" is much more superficial and more focused on effect instead of content.

Macfarlane really raves with the cult of walking that is now thriving in almost all W ‘There is no road, the road is made by walking’ Antonio Machado

It's bad luck for Robert Macfarlane that I read his book immediately after The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, which is characterized by its purity and depth. Macfarlane regularly refers to Shepherd and he also wrote a nice preface in the reissue of her book. But "The Old Ways" is much more superficial and more focused on effect instead of content.

Macfarlane really raves with the cult of walking that is now thriving in almost all Western countries, and he sometimes turns it into pure bigotry. I was particularly bothered by his phobia of Neolithic and Mesolithic paths and remains, which regularly turned into a kind of "noble savage"-mania. The author also constantly puts himself in the spotlight as if he were the presenter of a TV documentary permanently visible with all his peddling tics. I was bothered by historical inaccuracies, such as the claim that the ancient Romans only had eyes for country roads and neglected the seaways. His excursions almost always end with hallucinations as if prolonged walking suddenly gives access to another dimension of reality in which ghosts, panthers and other unlikely phenomena can be observed.

But I don't want to complain too much about this book. Of course, I share Macfarlane's enthusiasm for tracing and walking old roads, and exploring their historical and spatial context. It's quite entertaining to read his different adventures, both in the UK as a in some other parts of the world. Throughout the book there are sometimes striking descriptions of the interaction between landscapes and the people who live in them or walk through them, such as this: “Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: "scapes", it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only about the courses of our lives, but instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take 'landscape' as a collective term for the temperature and the pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme), and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment. ” Also his references to Edward Thomas and the moving evocation of the last days of that British poet in the trenches in the 1st world war are quite worthwhile.

But yes, this book has disappointed me a little. Macfarlane wants to tell to many things at once, and he is also very indebted to predecessors (which he leaves unquoted). For more original and in-depth reflections on walking, you should go to Rebecca Solnit (A History of Walking) and Tim Ingold (Lines), and of course first and foremost to Nan Shepherd. (2.5 stars) ...more

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Nov 26, 2012 Graychin rated it liked it · review of another edition

My hopes for this book were dampened by the heavy-handed opening section, but when MacFarlane got to talking about his excursion on the “Broomway,” a tidal public right-of-way between the Essex coast and Foulness (wonderful name), he had me. He had me, that is, but then lost me again after fudging what seemed two promising but poorly accomplished sailing expeditions and unadvisedly taking seriously an “artist” friend who believes his masterpiece will involve implanting a human skeleton packed in ...more

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Dec 30, 2012 Will Ansbacher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, biography, travel

This is pure magic. The old ways are foot-paths and sea-lanes, mostly around Britain, but in Spain, Palestine and China too for good measure. Macfarlane has a wonderful descriptive style; his similes and metaphors are breathtaking yet never go over the top into the purple prose of Creative Writing. Reading them (and I read a few selections aloud to R for the sheer pleasure of hearing the word-plays and allusions) is almost like reading poetry. Within each chapter, there are digressions into the ...more

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Oct 18, 2014 Nicky rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

The Old Ways was, for me, a bit like reading Richard Fortey's work. Non-fiction that I'm not necessarily very interested in, but which is beautifully written, lyrical, literate. It wasn't boring at all -- meditative, perhaps. Sometimes Macfarlane's a little too airy and mystical for me, too caught up in his imagination, but sometimes he comes round to something like Fortey, like the book I read recently on meditation, like Francis Pryor's book about Seahenge and the ritual landscape.

I'm not part ...more

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Jul 14, 2018 Radiantflux rated it really liked it

Shelves: natural_world, audiobook, environmentalism-and-politics

73rd book for 2018.

I loved Macfarlane's use of language.

Each journey is a story, a pilgrimage, that builds together to something quite beautiful. He is somehow able to imbue magic to the simple action of walking along a well worn path.

I will definitely read more of Macfarlane.

4-stars. ...more

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Jul 12, 2020 Arielle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: islands, non-fiction, scotland-ireland, nature-non-fic, ocean-dwelling

So much of this is written so, so beautifully, and I wanted to love it, but again there were just a few... off things that tempered that potential for me. Mainly the fact that after a while it begins to feel so, so very white-male-centric (with Nan Shepherd the regular exception to prove the rule, or at least make it that much more heavy apparent) in a way that feels really quite unnecessary - so much of the book is taken up with a combination of both meeting people who are still alive, and disc So much of this is written so, so beautifully, and I wanted to love it, but again there were just a few... off things that tempered that potential for me. Mainly the fact that after a while it begins to feel so, so very white-male-centric (with Nan Shepherd the regular exception to prove the rule, or at least make it that much more heavy apparent) in a way that feels really quite unnecessary - so much of the book is taken up with a combination of both meeting people who are still alive, and discussing the writings of those who have (usually) passed on, all around the context of walking the old ways, and those he chose to focus on did not always feel worth the attention. Or rather - there are others whose stories might have been far more interesting. The occasional digression from the British Isles alone - to Palestine, and to the Himalayas - shows the potential to have also digressed from this focus, but also lead to uncomfortable moments, like this one, when talking to the mother of his Palestinian friend, writer/lawyer Raja Shehadeh:

Her brow furrowed. "The Israelis have stolen this land from us, they are thieves. I once wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan, I knew it would go in the waste-paper basket, but I needed to get it off my chest. 'Dear President Reagan,' it began...

I stopped listening.

(Just... why, Robert?! This is covered far better than I can attempt right now by another reader in this review. I've also seen him interview Robin Wall Kimmerer in a beautiful hour of reciprocal sharing and generosity of being; the person I saw speak there is very much at odds with the one inadvertently shown in these pages.)

And then there are the digressions of subject, which sometimes work here and often do not - for example the penultimate chapter spends so much time with what feels like the entire life of poet Edward Thomas, mentioning often - and in a weirdly appeasing way - his emotional cruelty to his wife, and giving in great detail the last days spent at the front of WW1. It's all written very beautifully, but is so very off topic (it does return to the idea of paths in a quite lovely way, very occasionally through the chapter, but so much time is spent listing what feels like every telegram sent, every song played by the soldiers on their gramophone, that it's hard to remember what the point actually is) that it felt entirely out of place, part of an entirely different book.

The moments where the work really sings are when MacFarlane is in the beloved spaces he returns to so often in his writing - the Cairngorms, the northern isles - and I could have happily soaked up more hours of listening about the old sea roads of the Hebrides. It's just a shame the rest lost its way a little. ...more

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Dec 02, 2012 Laura Leaney rated it really liked it

Occasionally, while hiking or walking , I’ll have some kind of contemplative moment, or I’ll hug a tree in order to feel the cool greenness of lichen against my cheek, but usually when I look at an oak tree or a shale slope I see an oak tree and a shale slope. My mind, as Hedley Lamarr says in Blazing Saddles is “aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.” The “seething cauldron” of non-peacefulness.

I walk a lot. I live near the ocean – and so Occasionally, while hiking or walking , I’ll have some kind of contemplative moment, or I’ll hug a tree in order to feel the cool greenness of lichen against my cheek, but usually when I look at an oak tree or a shale slope I see an oak tree and a shale slope. My mind, as Hedley Lamarr says in Blazing Saddles is “aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.” The “seething cauldron” of non-peacefulness.

I walk a lot. I live near the ocean – and sometimes I don’t even see it through the cloudy cataracts of work and worry that I can’t peel off.

Reading Robert MacFarlane’s book was like learning how to walk again – walking like the most present-minded Buddhist on the earth after you’ve been awarded a university education and read thousands of books. MacFarlane is the most erudite lover of topography I’ve ever read. More knowledgeable than Thoreau's Walden, more interesting than Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, and more inspiring than a High Sierra trail guide, this book shows the reader a way to see while you're on the journey.

It took me a long time to read this book, not because I got bored, but because it’s beautiful and slow and I didn’t want to rush. The book is divided by place (England, Scotland, Abroad, and back to England) and then again by landscape (Limestone, Roots, and Ice for instance). So I paused between places and let it sink in. Wherever MacFarlane is, he “follows the ancient footprints” and weaves in a remarkable knowledge of poetry, painting, music, and history. I learned more words in this one book than in the last five years of reading.

One less than beautiful section was still quite compelling; it’s the one called Limestone, where MacFarlane travels to Palestine to see his friend Raja Shehadeh. After the beauty of England and Scotland – a beauty so primal and mythic that it takes the breath – the paths they walk in Palestine are unnaturally frightening. Instead of being menaced by tides or animals, the danger is human: “A hundred yards further on, the road ran out, dribbling to a stop next to a part-completed villa. We moved onto rough ground and picked up a path that descended the terracing, towards the wadi bed. The heat of the day was building but a big westerly wind was also blowing. At the base of an olive tree was a scatter of big bullet-casings. They looked like the spoor of a creature: AK-47 droppings.” I’m sorry, but I would not have enough boldness to take this path.

MacFarlane quotes Nietzsche as saying “only those thoughts which come from walking have any value” and Wallace Stevens, “Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake.” Most people will feel the sense of both lines. There is a marvelous mind-clearing simplicity in just walking.
...more

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Jun 13, 2012 Sienna rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012, kindle, favorites

(Deep breath: this may be effusive.)

How best to read The Old Ways: in transit — in motion — walking or riding or flying a path either unknown or familiar, deeply and thoughtfully, recognizing that it alters you as you change it, any way at all, really, so long as it's not quickly, lest one of the otherwise indelible stories this book contains slips by you.

I devoured the first few chapters before forcing myself to slow down and savor Macfarlane's way with words, the unexpected, compressed perfect ...more

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Jan 23, 2013 Sher rated it it was amazing

The finest essay writing about ways -- paths both terra firma, water, sand, snow, and ice. Each chapter is a separate work, and Macfarlane interweaves his story of experiencing the path and introduces the reader to past travelers and present masters of the path. Moments of the most brilliant prose (naturalist perspective) I have ever read. Sentences I would read again and again for their freshness and astounding organization. "The moon, low, a waxing half, richly coloured -- a red-butter moon, s ...more

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Dec 31, 2016 Gill rated it liked it

3.5 stars

I had a library copy, which I had to read straight through quickly and return. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had been able to dip into it over a longer period, and enjoy it a section at a time.

I enjoy Macfarlane's writing style, and the way that he mixes personal experiences, historical information, descriptive writing etc in each section. I was especially interested in all the parts about Edward Thomas and about Eric Ravilious.

Afterthought from reading this book: I do ...more

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Jun 08, 2012 Overbylass rated it liked it

I really enjoyed parts of this book.I have realised now that this is a personal journey for the author -walking with friends, rather than a generic book about old paths, ways -which I was expecting. Most of the walks are set in Southern England, Scotland and abroad recalling facts and feelings about these places and the people the author walks with and meets. I did feel a little let down by the book truthfully . Firstly,as a Northerner (seemingly no old ways come to this part of the country!) an ...more

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Mar 28, 2014 John rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: travel, audiobook, history, library_books

Really 3.5 stars, but I'm rounding up as the audio narration fit the storyline so well.

The U. K. travels I found far stronger material than the treks in Spain, Palestine, and Asia. Others have found fault with the prose as "too purple," which I can understand; however, the theme here is quite nature-specific, which ordinarily would be difficult to hold my interest, but Macfarlane was fairly successful in that regard. If I had to use a single word to describe the book, "evocative" comes to mind. ...more

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Apr 05, 2015 Dylan Horrocks rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: belief-read, landscape-and-nature

Someone asked what this book was like and I found myself describing it as the most satisfying fantasy novel I'd read in a long time, only it's not fantasy and it's not a novel.

If, like me, your favourite parts of The Lord of the Rings are the bits where they're walking across Middle Earth sharing stories and exploring the magic of place, then this book will rock your world.

Of course, there's much more to it than that, but it's all been said elsewhere; so I just want to add that I'm pretty sure ...more

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Apr 11, 2020 Abigail Bok rated it it was amazing

The Old Ways is not a book to be wolfed down. It is a journey to be savored in digestible chunks, essay by essay--though not set aside for long stretches, because the essays are not standalones. Each builds to a degree on what has come before, layering imagery and information the way time layers chalk or rock, and that inter-referentiality is a crucial element of the book that should not be lost in the gaps between reading sessions.

Robert Macfarlane is one of our finest practitioners of nature p The Old Ways is not a book to be wolfed down. It is a journey to be savored in digestible chunks, essay by essay--though not set aside for long stretches, because the essays are not standalones. Each builds to a degree on what has come before, layering imagery and information the way time layers chalk or rock, and that inter-referentiality is a crucial element of the book that should not be lost in the gaps between reading sessions.

Robert Macfarlane is one of our finest practitioners of nature prose, and here he has chosen a resonant subject--a series of walks following traditional public rights-of-way, mostly in Britain but a few elsewhere. Each essay visits a different place, and each is rich with the specifics of that location, ecology, geology, human history. Macfarlane has compiled a whole book on the vocabulary specific to places (Landmarks) and these pieces are luxuriantly adorned with that wondrous language. Often, too, he walks with a companion, and that person's life and point of view get woven into the narrative.

But crucially, that lavish accretion of detail in this book is pressed into service to a larger, overarching purpose. Woven through the whole is a series of images and themes that turn the book into a single journey, not a series of disparate journeys.

An earlier path-walker and nature writer, Edward Thomas, lies at the heart of this greater journey. His life, his words, the quest that impelled him out onto the paths live as a shadow-walker accompanying Macfarlane on his journey; and ultimately, the journeys of everyone who has traveled the same paths become part of his journey, all our journeys, as well. The act of walking out becomes an act of walking in, into the heart of who we are, as individuals and collectively.

That is the scrubbed version of this book--it does not on every page reach those heights. But neither do we live in a constant state of elevated awareness, alive to the resonances of the past and the universal all around us. Those awarenesses come in glints and glimmers, only to be occluded in the next moment as we are "distracted from distraction by distraction," in T. S. Eliot's words; but it is to Macfarlane's credit that he is forever reaching for those moments of satori and eloquently describing their flavor and texture. And even when he gets a little distracted, the rich music of his language carries the reader through to the next breakthrough to the sublime. As is the case with all the Mysteries, I came to a place where I didn't quite know what I knew, but I knew that I knew it. What a trip! ...more

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Jun 11, 2012 Jo Bennie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: m

MacFarlane completes his trilogy of nature writing with a meditation on walking. It can be read seperately but dovetails beautifully with its companions. MacFarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was an exploration of how the cultural concept of mountains has changed over time. The second, The Wild Places, of the concept of wilderness and our need to reach for it. This third book, The Old Ways, speaks of the lost pathways that were used by our ancestors and are almost, but not quite, forgo MacFarlane completes his trilogy of nature writing with a meditation on walking. It can be read seperately but dovetails beautifully with its companions. MacFarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was an exploration of how the cultural concept of mountains has changed over time. The second, The Wild Places, of the concept of wilderness and our need to reach for it. This third book, The Old Ways, speaks of the lost pathways that were used by our ancestors and are almost, but not quite, forgotten, like lost plague villages visible from the air as marks in a field.

The book is divided into four parts, each covering a different geographical set of wanderings.

The first section is of MacFarlane's journeys in England, as he traces the Icknield Way from his home outside Cambridge to the Downs and walks the 'most dangerous path in Britain': the Broomway tidal road across the Maplin Sands alongside Foulness Island, traversing holloways, chalk paths and a Roman Road, sleeping out to be woken by skylarks, crunching in the snow and striding toe to toe with his own reflection across wet sands.

Next he goes north to his beloved Scotland, exploring the trackless motorway of the sea road through the Minches to the Shiants, Rona and Sula Sgeir and across peat and granite moors, reflecting on a post glacial landscape ground out by the ice and bearing the signs of early human occupation.

In the third part MacFarlane travels abroad to walk in Palestine, to follow part of the Camino pilgrim road in Spain and the pilgrim route around the feet of Minya Konka in Western Tibet, the most sacred mountain in Buddhism. In these less familiar landscapes his writing takes on a tone of wonder at new fauna, flora, weather, people and political strictures.

Finally he homes and returns to following the Ridgeway across Marlborough Downs, the South Downs to Eastbourne, circling in a gyre around a subject that McFarlane touches on again and again before focusing on it in the closing chapters. The life of Edward Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, poet, depressive and compulsive walker is addressed directly in 'Ghost', an account of Thomas' life with his wife Helen and his use of walking as a curative for his raging depressions. In the very last chapter MacFarlane opens out again and shows us the evanescent prints of early humans walking across a mud flat, now revealed by the tides.

MacFarlane's book is not easy to categorise, it mediates on many aspects, some connected with walking such as the drive of wanderlust and the push of the curious mind, some with the wandering trails the mind takes on such a journey, of geology, deep time, human history, companionship, solitude and spirituality. Another wonderful book by an author I turn to with delight. ...more

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Jun 18, 2019 Camelia Rose rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio, nature-writing, essays, britain-themed

I’ve found a new favourite nature writer! So many beautiful, powerful paragraphs that I want to read and re-read. I especially love the part about China and Scottish islands.

Some examples:

"'We picked the path up at the edge of the cloud cover that day,' she said, 'and then we stepped into the mist under the mountain and the rest of the world was lost.'"

"how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate I’ve found a new favourite nature writer! So many beautiful, powerful paragraphs that I want to read and re-read. I especially love the part about China and Scottish islands.

Some examples:

"'We picked the path up at the edge of the cloud cover that day,' she said, 'and then we stepped into the mist under the mountain and the rest of the world was lost.'"

"how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot's phrase, can 'enlarge the imagine range for self to move in'.

“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.”

“From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.”

“When the lark sing he feels invulnerable.”
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Dec 19, 2013 Nimue Brown rated it it was amazing

Despite what the title may suggest to a Pagan reader, this is not, exactly, a book about old religion. It’s about walking. Much of that walking however, happens on ancient trackways, and pilgrim routes, so the old ways in the sense of roads connect with the old ways in the sense of our ancestor’s beliefs.

I’m a walking Druid. For me, walking has become an act of communion and ritual. Author Robert MacFarlane expresses how and why that should be so, in beautiful, lyrical depictions of journeys. Wa ...more

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Jun 15, 2017 Laura rated it liked it

Recommends it for: Bettie, Wanda

Shelves: nature, travel, audio-books, non-fiction, read-2017, british-literature, memoir-biography

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the week:
"Humans are like animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets, holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths."

Author Robert Macfarlane follows some ancient routes in the UK and overseas. As well as having adventures on the way - as you do on foot - he ponders the creation of old paths, t ...more

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About Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane

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Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.

Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountain ...more

Books by Robert Macfarlane

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

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“Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind.

"Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.' ” — 19 likes

“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.” — 18 likes

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