The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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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).

The Old Ways - Penguin Books UK

In these places & in the name of Christ", MacLeod tells the author with a crinkled smile while standing on the ruins of an ancient chapel on a remote headland, "I have a preference for pre-Reformation Christianity mixed with pagan habits, a time when ale was libated to the sea to increase the fertility of the seaweed & the fish, when there was new-moon worship, dancing & fornication!" MacLeod despises religious fundamentalism because it means, as he put it, "the extinction of metaphor", preferring to celebrate the Book of Genesis as a folktale, not doctrine". 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. 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.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 Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on Sunday

Robert Macfarlane - Penguin Books UK Robert Macfarlane - Penguin Books UK

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). But even despite my poor reading plan the power of his passion was enough to carry me through, as he tells us over and over to take one more look, just one, at what we have around us, and does it with such a lovely passion that it is usually not a strain to listen one more time: The Old Ways confirms Robert Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on SundayFelt pressure, sensed texture and perceived space can work upon the body and so too upon the mind, altering the textures and inclinations of thought.” How do I reach into my grab-bag of dozens of highlighted passages and do justice to this telling without boring you? I can't — but I can't resist sharing anyway, and hoping that I choose wisely enough to convince you to read more: 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. 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:

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane: 9780147509796

When he arrives, Macfarlane is instructed by Blanco to choose three books from the library: these will correspond to his past, present and future. "You don't need to take much care," Blanco's wife Elena tells him with a smile, "because the books will choose you, not the other way around."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. 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 guess) might be something we can't even remember, something we have to learn like a new language...

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane | Waterstones

There is a humility to the act of the kora, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. Circle and circuit, potentially endless, stand against the symbolic finality of the summit. The pilgrim on the kora contents himself always with looking up and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto knowledge.” There is another elegy in The Old Ways – for Macfarlane's grandfather. And there are many new teachers: a sailor skilled enough to cross the Minch to the Shiant Islands; a sculptor and a Tibetologist; a friend who knows the danger and importance of walking in Ramallah "discovering stories other than those of murder and hostility". They all become important figures in a book about the ways people come to know places.

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.