The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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The acclaimed author of The Wild Placesand Underlandexamines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move I was intrigued to come across this book, which according to Robert McFarlane, is “about people and place; about walking as a reconnoiter inward and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.” 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. The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on Sunday

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes): Macfarlane The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes): Macfarlane

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. 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.

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There are textbooks too. A Victorian field guide, for example, describes Agrimonia in rather uncompromising terms: "Herbs with stipulate, pinnate, serrate leaves and terminal bracteate spine-like racemes of small yellow flowers." Macfarlane is not much the wiser. "I was pressed to think of a description less likely to help me identify agrimony when I saw it." He quotes that little snippet from a past age of botanical expertise as a kind of public self-reproach. A nature writer, after all, should probably know his field flora. But then again, the quotation serves to emphasise the distinctiveness of Macfarlane's nature-writing in The Old Ways. He wants to find a language for sensory experience, and to test the languages used by walkers before him. 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 - Penguin Books UK The Old Ways - Penguin Books UK

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.” Really do love it. He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley 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: Sometimes, my imagination wanders as I walk, and I wonder about the characters who have walked these same paths before me. In England, I walked in some of the ancient forests including Savernake and Sherwood and imagined days gone by. McFarlane writes, “As I walk paths, I often wonder about the origins, the impulses that have led to their creation the records they yield of customary journeys, and the secrets they keep of adventures, meetings and departures.”

Multibuys

A beautifully modulated call from the wild, that will ensorcell any urban prisoner wishing to break free.” ―Will Self

The Old Ways - Penguin Books UK

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 flap of Gore-tex showing beneath the stones. He understood straight away what had happened. The glacier had shifted, and the cairn had shifted with it, but- in the surprisingly tender way of glaciers- Jonathan’s frozen body had been pushed to the surface.’ 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.The book is a nice mix of personal reflection, narration, and history. Included are extended anecdotes about other great "walkers," including the painter Eric Ravilious and the poet Edward Thomas, both victims of wars. I was quite taken by Macfarlane's suggestion that he found the late author Barry Lopez to be a transformative influence; in fact, the exceedingly introspective language he uses is quite reminiscent of Arctic Dreams& other works by Lopez. The work of Edward Thomas seems an even more profound influence. I have been affected by the life & work of Edward Thomas: essayist, soldier, singer, among the most significant of modern English poets--and the guiding spirit of this book. Born in 1878 of Welsh parents and from a young age, both a writer & a walker, Thomas made his reputation with a series of travelogues, natural histories & biographies, as well as poetry, prior to being killed at the age of 39, at dawn on Easter Monday 1917 during the WWI Battle of Arras.It seems that almost every word is accompanied by its etymology, with linguistic declensions abounding in The Old Ways. In charting a path, McFarland comments that... knowledge became codified over time in the form of rudimentary charts & peripli& then in route books in which we see paths that are recorded as narrative poems: the catalogue of ships in the Iliad is a pilot's mnemonic, for instance as is the Massaliote Periplus (possibly 6th century BC). 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." 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. 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.

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane: 9780147509796

It has so far been a quarter of a century in the making, and at last count it consisted of more than 1,100 books — though its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book records a journey made by walking, and each contains the natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beach, elm. (239) 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 I have long been fascinated by 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 imagined range for self to move in'. 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.comDavid 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)