The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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But this is a spacious and inclusive book, which allows for many shifts in emphasis, and which, like the best paths, is always different when you go back to look at it again. I expect this is one of those books that is best read in individual chapters, spaced apart by days or even weeks. Certain images keep glimmering in the dark when I close my eyes: fragments of white china clay scattered as a trail across the bogs of Dartmoor; marker stones on Bodmin guiding a parson safely around his parish; posts sticking up from the water in the monochrome mirror-world of flooded Doggerland where the narrow "Broomway" leads out to Foulness. At first I thought Robert was old, but when I realised he was not much older that me, he started to remind me very intensely of someone (another white guy) I used to know, who treated me like dirt when I became inconvenient. Macfarlane's way of writing [is] free, exploratory, rambling and haphazard but resourceful, individual, following his own whims, and laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow' Sunday Times'Macfarlane relishes wild, as well as old, places.

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

His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Lying there, I could still feel the day at sea, blood and water slopping about in my bag of skin, the tidal churn of my liquid body, a roll and sway in the skull. Felt pressure, sensed texture and perceived space can work upon the body and so too upon the mind, altering the textures and inclinations of thought. 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. In the Netherlands there are doodwegen and spookwegen – death roads and ghost roads – which converge on medieval cemeteries.Two of the climbers had serious injuries, one escaped unharmed, but one, a nature photographer named Jonathan, broke his neck and died in the arms of one of the other climbers. A trip in a small boat in the Outer Hebrides to a remote bird nesting island long targeted for an annual harvest leads to ruminations on how human use of known pathways over the water in prehistoric times made these apparently isolated communities by the sea more connected culturally with comparable seafaring peoples in the Baltic and Mediterranean countries than with communities of inland U. During the winter months, the only route in and out of the remote valley of Zanskar in the Indian Himalayas is along the ice-path formed by a frozen river. Along the way he walks stride for stride with a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, follows the 'deadliest path in Britain', sails an open boat out into the Atlantic at night, and crosses paths with walkers of many kinds - wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers and devouts. But, he does pick some fine words and fine quotes, especially from Nan Shepherd, who I'd already been looking forward to reading.

The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot - Google Books The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot - Google Books

He repeatedly reaffirms his agreement with the Scottish novelist Nan Shepherd's belief that when she went walking, she ended up walking not 'up' but 'into' mountains. He is wry about his own romanticism ("what I thought was the first star turned out to be the night light for a plane coming into Luton"), but he wants to make space for it. Fifteen of them are made by Macfarlane himself, along paths in the British Isles and, further afield, in Spain, Palestine and Tibet.When Edward Thomas travelled to fight on the Western Front the memories of his south country were among the things he carried.

The Old Ways - Paths The Old Ways - Paths

In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made. The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land—onwards in space but also backwards in time to the histories of a route and its previous followers. There are so many outstanding reviews of this book that there is little, if anything, new for me to say.

If you find this I say persevere, because it settles down and one or two pieces are excellent and moving (especially the penultimate chapter).

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Macfarlane, Robert The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Macfarlane, Robert

For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? 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. Meet his adventuresome friends, including Isle of Harris sculptor, Steve Dilworth, whom I did look up on the Internet so I could admire his work. S. Eliot, particularly his first quartet, with the bird in the garden inviting us into another world where the light dappled differently across the pool and witches’ ingredients lay in the moss at the feet of each tree. To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: "scapes", it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives, but instant by instant, incident by incident. He coins the word "xenotopia" to describe an uncanny landscape, and for my money the part of the book that nails this concept best, and which will get you irrevocably hooked on his writing, is when he travels the Broomway, a contingent path along tidal sands between Wakering Stairs and Foulness in Essex, unearthly in both the literal and figurative senses, and said to be the most dangerous path in Britain.