MacFarlane reckons he was walked 5 or 6 thousand miles on his foot journeys. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets-say the names of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite-holloways, bostles, shuts, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths. English is particularly rich in pregnant words for pathways: 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. MacFarlane finds insight in how much human language is infused with words for travel paths and their purpose. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. 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. 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. with side trips in Spain, Palestine, and Tibet. It gets you tuned into walking journeys all over the U.K. This one really hit the sweet spot for me.

In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.Įducated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

The old ways a journey on foot