The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Product Information

He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley 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

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. This is a wonderful book. Superbly written, reflective, illuminating on connections between people, places, journeys and times. A treasure. The Folio Society - Collected Poems by Thomas Hardy". www.hardysociety.org . Retrieved 30 May 2022. 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"The Lost Words campaign delivers nature 'spellbook' to Scottish schools". The Guardian. 10 February 2018 . Retrieved 5 May 2019.

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 ] Macfarlane was born in Halam, Nottinghamshire, and attended Nottingham High School. [1] He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began a PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the college.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.

Then there's Finlay MacLeod, "a fierce opponent of those he considers his fierce opponents", who rightly views geography and history as consubstantial (147): Every Robert MacFarlane book offers beautiful writing, bold journeys . . . With its global reach and mysterious Sebaldian structure, this is MacFarlane's most important book yet' David Rothenberg, author of Survival of the Beautiful and Thousand Mile Song 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: Two ghosts stand out from the rest. Macfarlane’s grandfather, a diplomat and mountaineer, instilled in him a love of roaming. An especially tender chapter recounts a ritual walk Macfarlane took across Scotland’s Cairngorm massif to attend his grandfather’s funeral. Here he recalls how that peak-obsessed man was forced in his 80s to yield to age: first driven down from the summits to the passes, then from the passes to the valleys, he in turn forsakes the valleys “for the limestone land around the house.” “Stride shortened to shuffle, shuffle to dodder, dodder to step. . . . During the same years that my grandfather was losing the ability to walk, my children — his two first great-­grandchildren — were gaining it. Step lengthened to dodder, dodder to shuffle, shuffle to stride.”Shortlist for 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize announced - Samuel Johnson Prize". thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk . Retrieved 15 May 2015. 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. Boyd Tonkin (18 July 2008). "Call of the wild: Britain's nature writers". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 29 July 2008 . Retrieved 31 December 2008. Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. 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."

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. 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... No hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Translation: There is no road, the road is made by walking. Antonio Machado 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." 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 IyerDalrymple, William (10 June 2012). "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane – review". The Guardian. London. The concept that “the earliest stories are told not in print but footprint” is brought home by a walk on a beach where erosion of each tide uncovers prehistoric footprints preserved in the mud. He walks in the path of a hunter and spies prints left by playing children. He makes a wonderful digression on the anatomy of feet: 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. Beyond that, for Robert Macfarlane, a University of Cambridge professor & the author of numerous other books, including Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places,"the metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility." 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".