4.0
The Old Ways
ByPublisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland, an exploration of walking and thinking
In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.
Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. 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. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.
Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. 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. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Old Ways Reviews
4.0
“… “The land itself, filled with letters, words, texts, songs, signs and stories. And always, everywhere, the paths, spreading across counties and countries, recalled as pattern rather than as plot, bringing alignments and discrepancies, elective affinities, shifts from familiar dispositions. I imagine the Earth seen from an altitude so impossibly great that retrospect is possible as well as prospect, and that the prints of millennia of human walking are visible, the shimmering foil of our species.”
This is exactly what I love in nature writing - with the snake eating its tale, for we are nature, and writing natural writing is us too. I'm going on a deep dive to read, listen, and look up some of the classic works referenced here. See if I can capture some of this magic in the words that inspire Macfarlane.”
“Author examines Britain's ancient paths, emphasizing their connection to human experience through solitary winter walks.
He reflects on historic routes like the Icknield Way, intertwining personal narratives with natural landscapes.”
About Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prizewinning books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland . He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Other books by Robert Macfarlane
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