The old ways, p.1
The Old Ways, page 1
Robert Macfarlane
THE OLD WAYS
A Journey on Foot
Contents
PART I TRACKING
(England)
1 Track
2 Path
3 Chalk
4 Silt
PART II FOLLOWING
(Scotland)
5 Water – South
6 Water – North
7 Peat
8 Gneiss
9 Granite
PART III ROAMING
(Abroad)
10 Limestone
11 Roots
12 Ice
PART IV HOMING
(England)
13 Snow
14 Flint
15 Ghost
16 Print
Author’s Note
Notes
Select Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgements
‘Wonderful. Macfarlane has a rare physical intelligence, and his writing affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time’ Antony Gormley
‘He is a great writer about walks and walking, and in this book he walks in all kinds of weather, in this country and elsewhere, in bare feet and shod, and the way he writes is exquisite. He’s a poet in prose, and it’s the most beautiful stuff to read. The Old Ways thrilled me and delighted me and made me want to start walking again myself. It’s a wonderful book and I thoroughly recommend it’ Philip Pullman
‘An extraordinary book … It has made me feel that I myself am always walking some eternal track, sharing its pleasures and hardships with uncountable others, treading its immemorial footprints, linking me with all the generations of man and beast, and connecting in particular the visionary author of the book, as he unrolls his sleeping bag beneath the stars, with this bemused reviewer beside the fire’ Jan Morris, Daily Telegraph
‘Robert Macfarlane walked the ancient byways of the British landscape, from Neolithic tracks to pilgrim paths. This is his beautifully written account of the stories behind them’ Sunday Express
‘A wonderful book – literally a book full of wonders. He has a poet’s eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy. In a barbarous time, Macfarlane reminds us of what it is to be civilized’ John Banville, Guardian (Books of the Year)
‘Macfarlane’s writing soars. Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again’ Metro
‘Powerful and passionate, packed with stories based in geography, history, myth, gossip, legend, religion, geology and the natural world. Macfarlane’s writing moves and enthralls. He is the ultimate walker and recorder of places … It is like seeing what I see suddenly from inside out’ Rachel Joyce, The Times
‘Our finest nature writer: the great achievement of The Old Ways is to re-create a sense of the land as both holy ground and theatre. It constantly reminds us that we never stop searching for our place in this world, by touch and feel, sometimes barefoot, and sometimes lost, but always on the way’ John Burnside, New Statesman
‘Luminous … an iconoclastic blend of natural history, travel writing and much more … Macfarlane wears his polymath intelligence lightly as his mind roams across geology, archaeology, fauna, flora, architecture, art, literature and urban design, retrieving small surprises everywhere he walks. He upends the stereotype of the environmental writer as a surly, solitary misanthrope railing against human desecrations of the wild. His book positively teems with people. [He] has given us a gorgeous book about physical movement and the movement of memory, one that resounds with stories told to “the beat of the placed and lifted foot” ’ The New York Times
‘In Macfarlane, British travel writing has a formidable new champion … Macfarlane is read above all for the beauty of his prose and his wonderfully innovative and inventive way with language … he can write exquisitely about anywhere’ William Dalrymple, Observer
‘Author of the sublime Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places , Mr Macfarlane has carved a groove for himself in the landscape of literature along which he wanders and wonders, exploring our deep connection to pathways physical and metaphorical, continuing his meditation on the lyrical link between man and the land’ Dan Stevens, Wall Street Journal (Books of the Year)
‘Intricate, sensuous, haunted, fascinating. Macfarlane will have many of his readers dreaming in path-language’ Guardian
‘A magnificent and beautiful book, the best Macfarlane has written. His co-travellers on these paths are so richly realized that the business of walking is alive with their lives. The Old Ways shows that landscape is more than a route to understanding; it actually is understanding, at least when known and felt in that material-ethereal way of which Macfarlane is the master’ Adam Nicolson
‘Macfarlane is a writer-naturalist whose reputation rests on a remarkable ability to conjure nature in full quintaphonic sensual detail, with a beguiling pulse of the spiritual that places him firmly in the romantic line. The Old Ways magnificently sends us out from our attenuated, screen-dominated lives into a thicker, more sensual world, where all the riches we want are spread out at our feet and free’ Adam Thorpe, Times Literary Supplement
‘A writer with telescopic powers of observation and an acute sensitivity to the personality of landscape’ Sunday Times (Travel Books of the Year)
‘A marvellous marriage of scholarship, imagination and evocation of place. I read him for vicarious experience – he takes me to places I can never visit, never could have visited. He creates for his readers landscapes in the mind. I always feel exhilarated after reading Macfarlane’ Penelope Lively
‘Macfarlane steadily walks and climbs through places that most of us would shy away from and 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
‘I picked up the book thinking and hoping it would be a kind of guide to the ancient paths of Britain, but in fact it is much more than that: it is about the connection between people and places, the stories that these people share, and of paths not simply as physical routes, but routes into thought, culture and philosophy’ Ross Raisin, Granta (Books of the Year)
‘His theme is the way walking can be not just the occasion for thought but, in some sense, the method by which it is done; the way our experience of ourselves is shaped by moving through a landscape. There are few prose writers who take such a poet’s care with cadence. Fine writing – in the sense of precise, careful and original prose, lyrical without being pretentious – does exist. Macfarlane is an example of it’ Sam Leith, Spectator
‘Macfarlane is outstanding among the new naturalists in his desire to examine the full range of his responses to these paths, their history and legacy. Macfarlane writes superbly. He sustains admiration from first to last’ Frances Spalding, Independent
‘Macfarlane immerses himself in regions we may have thought familiar, resurrecting them newly potent and sometimes beautifully strange. In a moving achievement, he returns our heritage to us’ Colin Thubron
‘Evokes the spirit of places, both familiar and strange, in a way no other writer can manage’ Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph (Books of the Year)
‘Powerfully evocative and beautifully written’ John Gray, Guardian (Books of the Year)
‘Luminous, possessing a seemingly paradoxical combination of the dream-like and the hyper-vigilant, The Old Ways is a magnificent read. Each sentence can carry an astonishing discovery’ Rick Bass
‘This is a whole person walking the land in alert consciousness of its manifold dimensions’ Tim Robinson
‘Readers are invited to wander and lose themselves; and it is hard to think of a more pleasurable way to do so without leaving one’s chair’ Economist
‘Macfarlane relishes wild as well as old places; he writes about both beautifully’ John Sutherland, Financial Times
‘Macfarlane’s third book and unquestionably his best. It is the writing, the glorious grace of the writing that remains when the book is complete. There is a balance and rigour to the sentences that move from the lyricism of Joyce to beguiling flintiness. This makes you want to walk of course, but it also makes you want to read and remember’ Big Issue
‘Remarkable … All nature writing is an attempt to write ourselves into the landscape. It requires language to be sensual, to have its own tangible physicality. And that is Macfarlane’s great achievement: the tactility of his prose’ Herald
‘Captivating. Sentence after sentence delivers thrilling perception. The most observant, imaginative and accomplished wayfarer we have’ Evening Standard
‘The Old Ways is written with beauty and specificity, with a love of landscape that never unravels into sentimentality’ Chicago Tribune
‘A piece of modern-day enlightenment … an imaginative joy’ Radio Times
‘Powerfully evocative’ Colin Thubron, Observer (Books of the Year)
‘Macfarlane’s latest masterpiece … his lyrical genius ensures that The Old Ways never falters, never drops its pace – Macfarlane’s enthusiasm for walking, for travelling is utterly infectious. All who read his words will surely wish to wander, whether lost or not’ Green Letters
‘Exhilarating … offering so much more than just armchair travel, The Old Ways celebrates a humanized landscape and makes its readers more inquisitive, attentive and precise in their dealings with it’ Architectural Review
‘Shimmeringly memorable … the language is exceptional. This kind of spar
‘For the past decade this most physically vital and intellectually questing of Cambridge scholars has been renovating the canon of British nature writing: dusting off neglected figures, celebrating little-known contemporary practitioners, re-reading them in the light of contemporary ecological and social concerns. This fresh back story, assembled through a decade of literary journalism, essays, introductions to reissues of classic texts, as well as three extended prose works of increasing breadth and sophistication, of which The Old Ways is the culminant achievement, reveals a tradition more radical in conception, more politically charged and philosophically urgent than we could have imagined. Collectively, it asks us to renew our compact with the natural world, to see ourselves as formed and informed by landscape, even as we continue to reshape it’ Geordie Williamson, Australian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Macfarlane is the author of the award-winning Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places . He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE OLD WAYS
Book of the year, according to:
John Banville ( Guardian )
Antony Beevor ( Daily Telegraph )
Stephen Bleach ( Sunday Times )
Roger Cox ( Scotsman )
William Dalrymple ( Observer )
John Gray ( Guardian )
Penelope Lively ( Spectator )
Jan Morris ( Sunday Telegraph )
Andrew Motion ( Times Literary Supplement )
David Nicholls ( Guardian )
Philip Pullman ( Guardian )
Ross Raisin ( Granta )
Dan Stevens ( Wall Street Journal )
Colin Thubron ( Observer )
Boyd Tonkin ( Independent )
For Julia, Lily and Tom, and those who keep the paths open
Much has been written of travel, far less of the road.
Edward Thomas, The Icknield Way (1913)
My eyes were in my feet …
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (1977)
Maps
MAP 1
MAP 2
Part I
TRACKING (ENGLAND)
1
Track
All things are engaged in writing their history … Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850)
Two days short of the winter solstice; the turn of the year’s tide. All that cold day, the city and the countryside around felt halted, paused. Five degrees below freezing and the earth battened down. Clouds held snow that would not fall. Out in the suburbs the schools were closed, people homebound, the pavements rinky and the roads black-iced. The sun ran a shallow arc across the sky. Then just before dusk the snow came – dropping straight for five hours and settling at a steady inch an hour.
I was at my desk that evening, trying to work but distracted by the weather. I kept stopping, standing, looking out of the window. The snow was sinking through the orange cone cast by a street light, the fat flakes showing like furnace sparks.
Around eight o’clock the snow ceased. An hour later I went for a walk with a flask of whisky to keep me warm. I walked for half a mile along dark back roads where the snow lay clean and unmarked. The houses began to thin out. A few undrawn curtains: family evenings underway, the flicker and burble of television sets. The cold like a wire in the nose. A slew of stars, the moon flooding everything with silver.
At the southerly fringe of the suburb, a last lamp post stands by a hawthorn hedge, and next to it is a hole in the hedge which leads down to a modest field path.
I followed the field path east-south-east towards a long chalk hilltop, visible as a whaleback in the darkness. Northwards was the glow of the city, and the red blip of aircraft warning lights from towers and cranes. Dry snow squeaked underfoot. A fox crossed the field to my west at a trot. The moonlight was so bright that everything cast a crisp moon-shadow: black on white, stark as woodcut. Wands of dogwood made zebra-hide of the path; hawthorn threw a lattice. The trees were frilled with snow, which lay to the depth of an inch or more on branches and twigs. The snow caused everything to exceed itself and the moonlight caused everything to double itself.
This is the path I’ve probably walked more often than any other in my life. It’s a young way; maybe fifty years old, no more. Its easterly hedge is mostly hawthorn and around eight feet high; its westerly hedge is a younger mix of blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel and dogwood. It is not normally a beautiful place, but there’s a feeling of secrecy to it that I appreciate, hedged in as it is on both sides, and running discreetly as it does between field and road. In summer I’ve seen small rolling clouds of goldfinches rising from teasel-heads and then curling ahead to settle again, retreating in the measure that I approach them.
That evening the path was a grey snow alley, and I followed it up to the hanger of beech trees that tops the whaleback hill, passing off the clay and onto the chalk proper. At the back brink of the beech wood I ducked through an ivy-trailed gap, and was into the forty-acre field that lies beyond.
At first sight the field seemed flawless; floe country. Then I set out across it and started to see the signs. The snow was densely printed with the tracks of birds and animals – archives of the hundreds of journeys made since the snow had stopped. There were neat deer slots, partridge prints like arrowheads pointing the way, and the pads of rabbits. Lines of tracks curved away from me across the field, disappearing into shadow or hedge. The moonlight, falling at a slant, deepened the dark in the nearer tracks so that they appeared full as inkwells. To all these marks I added my own.
The snow was overwhelmingly legible. Each print-trail seemed like a plot that could be read backwards in time; a series of allusions to events since ended. I found a line of fox pugs, which here and there had been swept across by the fox’s brush, as if it had been trying to erase evidence of its own passage. I discovered what I supposed were the traces of a pheasant taking off: trenched footprints where it had pushed up, then spaced feather-presses either side of the tracks, becoming progressively lighter and then vanishing altogether.
I chose to follow a deer’s trail, which angled tightly across a corner of the field. The slots led through a blackthorn hedge: I snagged my way after them, and emerged into a surreal landscape.
To my north, the land swooped smoothly away downhill for 300 yards or so. South and uphill of where I stood, big white humps surrounded what appeared to be a small neat lake with a flagstick in its centre. There were copses of beech and stands of pine, sudden drops and draws in the land, rounded hills and swathed valleys.
I walked over to the lake, stepped out onto its surface, and by its flagstick I sat down and took a drink of whisky. Edited of its golfers by the darkness, transformed by snowfall and moonlight, the county’s most exclusive golf course had become a strange realm of open country. Murmuring insincere apologies to the club’s members, I left the first green and set off to explore the course. I walked straight down the middle of fairway after fairway, my shadow falling undistorted by my side. In the bunkers snow lay calf-deep and sifted. On the fifth green I lay on my back and watched the stars’ slow wheel.
Most of the animal tracks on the course had been left by rabbits. If you’ve seen rabbit prints in snow, you will know they resemble a Halloween ghost mask, or the face of Edvard Munch’s screamer: the two rear feet are placed laterally to make elongated eyes, and between and behind them fall the forefeet in a slightly offset paired line, forming nose and oval mouth. Thousands of these faces peered at me from the snow.
Occasionally the headlights of cars on the road to the west showed as long yellow tunnels of light. On the twelfth fairway something large and dark ran from tree to scrub cover: it looked like a wolf, but must have been a deer or fox, and set needles of silly fear pricking in the backs of my hands.
