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.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot By Robert Macfarlane |The Works

There isn't much of a progression, more a meandering of thought, so no pressure to complete the book. Within each chapter, there are digressions into the history behind the ways, and historical figures who were associated with them. With a steady command of the literature and history of each place he visits, [Macfarlane] tries 'to read landscapes back into being.

Robert Macfarlaneis thebestselling author of an award-winning trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart:Mountains of the Mind,The Wild Places, andThe Old Ways. 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 by Robert Macfarlane – review | Science and

When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them.

As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream. I knew of this, however what I hadn’t realized was that “The life of the road was the only option available to them, and in the 20-years after the war there was a substantial tramping population on the road sleeping out and living rough. The pattern standing clear: a cairn sequence, subtle but evident, running up from near Dubh Loch shore.