The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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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: I could relate to the euphoria he often experiences when walking by himself. One sentence particularly resonated with me and reminded me of a summer’s day years ago when I was sitting on top of Hen Comb, a fell in the Lake District, eating my lunch with a view through to Buttermere, not another soul in sight, my arm around my beautiful dog, Nell. It is not just about walking, journeys on foot. One surprising journey was sailing, on ancient sea roads which, he writes, 'are dissolving paths whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake, a brief turbulence astern. they survive as convention, tradition, as a sequence of coordinates, as a series of way marks, as dotted lines on charts and as stories and songs' (p88).. A Journey on Foot", reads the subtitle, but this is the story of many journeys. Fifteen of them are made by Macfarlane himself, along paths in the British Isles and, further afield, in Spain, Palestine and Tibet. He invokes, as he goes, hundreds of previous walkers, and hundreds of pathways – across silt, sand, granite, water, snow – each with its different rhythms and secrets. So the book is a tribute to the variety and complexity of the "old ways" that are often now forgotten as we go past in the car, but which were marked out by the footfall of generations. And it is an affirmation of their connectedness as part of a great network linking ways and wayfarers of every sort. Following Macfarlane's many travels, one understands why he thinks of his project as "a journey", singular rather than plural. In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey was published in May 2019. [18] It is a book about the deep-time pasts and futures of the Earth, as revealed by mythical underworlds and real subterranean journeys. [19] The book was serialized on BBC Radio 4 as the Book of the Week for 29 April - 3 May 2019. [20] Film [ edit ] He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley Read more Details Macfarlane’s method recalls W. G. Sebald’s literary meander down England’s southeast coast in “The Rings of Saturn.” Like Sebald, Macfarlane loves side stories, chance encounters that become vital portals into historical feeling. But despite this shared passion, Macfarlane adds a singular physical awareness. He exudes curiosity about the physiology of motion, about the way moving legs move the brain. Recuperating on a ridge after an arduous day, he observes that “my legs preserved a ghost sense of stride, a muscle memory of repeated action, and twitched forwards even as I rested.” Just a passing comment, as this is not a concern of the book: I found it a bit odd that someone so attached to the landscape would seemingly have so little concern for environmental destruction or the slaughter of animals. Perhaps he didn't want to be "political" by venturing into that territory.

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In 2022, Macfarlane was mentioned as an unlikely contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, [50] [51] which was won by Annie Ernaux. He suggested that we might call such "lands that are found beyond our frontiers," as "xenotopias," which means "foreign places" or "out-of-place places."

He is a patron of the Outdoor Swimming Society, the Outlandia Project, ONCA (One Network for Conservation and the Arts), and Gateway To Nature, a Lottery-funded mental-health initiative designed to improve access to nature for vulnerable groups and individuals. He is a founding Trustee of the charity Action For Conservation, which works to inspire a lifelong engagement with conservation in 12–17 year olds, working especially with schools with high pupil premium levels. With this mastery of both travel and nature writing he brings together into confluence two great streams of British nonfiction. There are echoes here of Roger Deakin, Ted Hughes and WG Sebald, and, more faintly, of their American counterparts, Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez. But Macfarlane seems to have learned especially from the careful observation and incandescent prose of one of his heroes, JA Baker, the anonymous Essex librarian who wrote one of the great classics of 20th-century nature writing, The Peregrine, a book that Macfarlane has championed and for whose US edition he wrote a fine introduction. I loved all of this and more, but Miguel Angel Blanco's Biblioteca del Bosque in Madrid found a path to my heart and will remain there until planes, trains and my own two feet carry me to it:

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A wonderfully meandering account of the author s peregrinations and perambulations through England, Scotland, Spain, Palestine, and Sichuan Macfarlane sparticular gift is his ability to bring a remarkably broad and varied range of voices to bear on his own pathways and to do so with a pleasingly impressionist yet tenderly precise style. Aengus Woods, "themillions.com" 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). Macfarlane seems to know and have read everything...his every sentence rewrites the landscape in language crunchy and freshly minted and deeply textured. Surely the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years." --Pico Iyer Thomas, says Macfarlane, experienced “the tension between roaming and homing”. He writes: “Thomas used the old ways to keep himself in motion, for like George Borrow – whose biography he wrote and with whom he closely identified – he was depressive”.

This book took me so long to read because McFarland took me to places I knew nothing about, so I “had to” do a lot of side-reading, a leading indicator on how much I am going to love a book. His sensibilities about place and our interaction with it, being in and passing through a place, putting our being there, were wonderful to share. I highlighted many passages that are quite moving and here is one. “Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.” Walking a path connects us to others who came before and those who come after us. Then there's Finlay MacLeod, "a fierce opponent of those he considers his fierce opponents", who rightly views geography and history as consubstantial (147):Anyway; somewhat more highly recommended than my rating indicates. If you are interested in walking, in premodern paths, or in British landscape you will probably enjoy reading at least a few chapters. There isn't much of a progression, more a meandering of thought, so no pressure to complete the book. Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It is an account of the development of Western attitudes to mountains and precipitous landscapes, and takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book asks why people, including Macfarlane, are drawn to mountains despite their obvious dangers, and examines the powerful and sometimes fatal hold that mountains can come to have over the imagination. The Irish Times described the book as "a new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which demands a new category of its own." [2] The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. London and New York: Penguin Hamish Hamilton and Viking. 2012. ISBN 9780670025114. Banff Mountain Book Competition Awards" (PDF). Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity . Retrieved 20 January 2022. Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year | Book awards | LibraryThing". www.librarything.com . Retrieved 20 January 2022.