The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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Macfarlane tends to prefer the wilder and woollier environments. His second book, The Wild Places, tried to get as close to wilderness as these islands can provide; I have not read his first, Mountains of the Mind, because of a review that said he describes whittling his frozen fingers with a penknife while crawling up, or down, some godforsaken peak. The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.” He goes on to write “The consolation of recollected places finds its expression frequently in the accounts of those exiles, prisoners, the ill, the elderly who can no longer physically reach the places that sustain them. When Edward Thomas travelled to fight on the Western Front the memories of his south country were among the things he carried.” This book is a meditation on how journeys are never just about getting from one place to another. Every land or seascape poses vistas to observe, problems to overcome, and reminders of deep time. Although most of the trips he describes take place in the British Isles, he goes as far afield as Palestine and Tibet. For me, in fact, those distant walks were the most interesting part of the book. In Palestine you have to break the law just to live, and in Tibet the sheer struggle for survival seems to highlight the majesty of limitless mountains and endless time.

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane – review | Science and

MacFarlane finds insight in how much human language is infused with words for travel paths and their purpose. For example, an Aboriginal tribe in western Canada has the same word for ‘knowledge’ and ‘footprint’, and the Tibetan word ‘shul’ carries the senses of ‘path forward’, ‘footprint’, and awareness of past events. English is particularly rich in pregnant words for pathways:He combines detailed, precise observation with poetic perception, imaginative extension and philosophical reflection. For instance 'Landscape has long offered us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought. (p193)' 'Travellers to the Holy Lands have always moved through a landscape of their imagination' (p220). David is a former scholar of Renaissance literature, turned antiquarian-book dealer, turned barrister, turned tax lawyer. He is probably the only Marxist tax lawyer in London, possibly in the world. He likes wearing britches, likes walking barefoot, and hopes daily for the downfall of capitalism. He is 6'7" tall, very thin, very clever, and has little interest in people who take it upon themselves to comment without invitation on his height and spindliness. We have covered a lot of miles together. (66) No hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Translation: There is no road, the road is made by walking. Antonio Machado Bindlestiff: a tramp or a hobo, especially one carrying a bundle containing a bedroll and other gear.

The Old Ways,’ by Robert Macfarlane - The New York Times ‘The Old Ways,’ by Robert Macfarlane - The New York Times

Adam Nicolson has written of the 'powerful absence[s]' that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest,warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance” 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.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. 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. The Old Ways confirms Robert Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on Sunday One of the fascinating characters encountered is a man named Finlay MacLeod, a Celtic original--a historian on the Isle of Lewis, as well as a naturalist, novelist, broadcaster, oral historian, occasional "selkie-singer" & seal summoner, someone who has devoted his life to exploration, archiving & mapping the archipelago. MacLeod is said to have the same restless curiosity as his hero Darwin, being "only interested in everything." 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.' ”

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane: 9780147509796

If you have a particular interest in the writer Edward Thomas, you will enjoy the last sections of the book. As I haven’t, other than loving the poem Adlestrop (and doesn’t everyone?), and as I’m not very familiar with the South Downs in England, I frankly found these sections a bit of a bore. That’s purely on the basis of personal interest, however, and didn’t detract from the pleasure the rest of the book gave me. This is a wonderful book. Superbly written, reflective, illuminating on connections between people, places, journeys and times. A treasure. 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 acclaimed author of The Wild Placesand Underlandexamines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move Macfarlane's first two books, Mountains of the Mind (2003) and The Wild Places (2007), were published to huge acclaim and have achieved the status of modern classics. The Old Ways joins up with them to form what Macfarlane calls "a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart". That definition is striking. It takes some courage for a writer to say that his subject is "the human heart". It sounds a little old-fashioned, a little out-of-step with modern detachment. But that is part of what makes Macfarlane's voice significant. He willingly declares his love of things. He brings his powerful intelligence to bear on the need to express sentiments and sensations.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.

The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane – review

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.Talking of war, many men returning from the first World War came home to England with no job or prospect of attaining reliable employment enough to support a family. I knew of this, however what I hadn’t realized was that “The life of the road was the only option available to them, and in the 20-years after the war there was a substantial tramping population on the road sleeping out and living rough. Plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys up and down the country as the woods became temporary homes to these shaken out casualties of conflict.” How tragic to give so much and then, come home to meander aimlessly without a purpose, or place to stay. We are spared that kind of scene here, I am pleased to report, and I must also add that "godforsaken" is pretty much the last word Macfarlane would use to describe a mountain. In his chapter on walking in the Himalayas, he quotes a companion on the concept of darshan, a Sanskrit word that "suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth; with a physical manifestation of the holy", and we are reminded that the Sherpas who accompanied the first expeditions had no word to describe the summit of a mountain, as that was where the gods lived, so it would be blasphemous even to try to reach one. Best of all are the descriptions of the people who accompany Macfarlane, or whom he meets along the way(s), as though he effortlessly, lovingly distills the essence of each person into a few sentences. There's the artist Steve Dilworth, who reminds Macfarlane that "a shaman who took himself seriously would be insufferable" (171). Of David Quentin, with whom he traversed the Broomway, he writes: The book starts and ends in MacFarlane's jolly own England. He also hopscotches across the globe to walk in Scotland, Palestine, and Tibet. His descriptions can be arresting. A police state of poetic diction, if you will. Good stuff. 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.