On landscapes, McFarlane writes “We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we’re in them or on them when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight, but there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia. Those places live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality and such places retreated to most often when we are most remote from them are among the most important landscapes we possess.” Anne Campbell on Lewis is "searching for the atavistic memory of maps of paths reclaimed by peat & time." Steve Dilworth on the Island of Harris recounts that he "has spent a lifetime making ritual objects from gathered local materials for a tribe that doesn't exist." Colorful characters abound in this book, serving as a pleasant relief from some of the more technical aspects that abide in The Old Ways. 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." 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.

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

He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley Macfarlane explores the meditative aspects of being a pedestrian…not so much a travelogue as a travel meditation, it favors lush prose, colorful digressions…if you’ve ever had the experience, while walking, of an elusive thought finally coming clear or an inspiration surfacing after a long struggle, The Old Ways will speak to you – eloquently and persuasively.”— The Seattle Times For him, as for so many other people, the mind was a landscape of a kind and walking a means of crossing it.”

Games

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

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane - Goodreads

Really do love it. He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony GormleyThis 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. 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 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 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 | Waterstones The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane | Waterstones

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

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot By Robert Macfarlane |The Works

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 beautifully modulated call from the wild, that will ensorcell any urban prisoner wishing to break free.” ―Will Self A marvellous marriage of scholarship, imagination and evocation of place. I always feel exhilarated after reading Macfarlane' Penelope Lively Wind-histories as well as wind-futures need to be taken into account, for the sea can have a long memory for past agitations. (124)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". 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.