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. 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 Paths are consensual, too, because without common care and common practice they disappear: overgrown by vegetation, ploughed up or built over (through they may persist in the memorious substance of land law). Like sea channels that require regular dredging to stay open, paths NEED walking.” 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 Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane - Penguin Books Australia The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane - Penguin Books Australia

This was my first book by Macfarlane, and my first book of this decade, and a good start on both fronts. I really enjoyed his style of writing, which felt immersive, though the pace of the book was sedate. I love walking myself, it is, for me, one of the most meditative things I can think to do, and The Old ways is a sort of ode to the practice. Definitely curious to read Macfarlane's much-praised newest book Underland soon!' 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 Short, nimble and bright-eyed, there is more than a hint of faery to Finlay. He has a crinkled smile and his shoulders shake when he laughs, which is often. He is constantly impious, though that doesn't stop him from taking things seriously. The only Christianity of which he approves was that which flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the island, a pre-Reformation worship in which pagan habits were mixed with Christian rites. (145) For some time now it has seemed to me that two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I m in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?” A wonderful book: Macfarlane has a rare physical intelligence, and his writing affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time Antony Gormley

Diaries & Calendars

He suggested that we might call such "lands that are found beyond our frontiers," as "xenotopias," which means "foreign places" or "out-of-place places." Robert Macfarlane travels Britain's ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, underappreciated landscape.

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

We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places - but we are far less good at saying what places make of us...” 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: In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made the walking of paths is, to [Macfarlane], an education, and symbolic, too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing, wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and behind. Alexandra Harris, The Guardian" Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It's hard to create a footpath on your own...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. For him, as for so many other people, the mind was a landscape of a kind and walking a means of crossing it.”

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. He refers to books which he 'appeared to open, but which actually opened me' (p242). This book has opened me to new ways of thinking about journeys, and the two way connections between us and the places we inhabit - we influence them, they influence us. some thoughts and some perceptions are only possible in particular places at particular times. 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.’ It's amazing how viewing others enjoying themselves can revitalize our own energy. At one point after covering several miles, McFarlane stops to watch folk running and playing on the heath and writes, “The pleasure these people were taking in their landscape and the feeling of company after the empty early miles of the day gave me a burst of energy and lifted my legs.” 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).

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane: 9780147509796

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 imagine range for self to move in'. 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. 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) 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). This was an interesting and well-written book. The author clearly love words and is frequently intoxicated by them. Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines.” Then there's Finlay MacLeod, "a fierce opponent of those he considers his fierce opponents", who rightly views geography and history as consubstantial (147):