The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Product Information

Bindlestiff: a tramp or a hobo, especially one carrying a bundle containing a bedroll and other gear. He suggested that we might call such "lands that are found beyond our frontiers," as "xenotopias," which means "foreign places" or "out-of-place places." I walk a lot. I live near the ocean – and sometimes I don’t even see it through the cloudy cataracts of work and worry that I can’t peel off.

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane – review | Science and

Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow' Sunday Times This was an interesting and well-written book. The author clearly love words and is frequently intoxicated by them. Macfarlane explores the meditative aspects of being a pedestrian…not so much a travelogue as a travel meditation, it favors lush prose, colorful digressions…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.”— The Seattle TimesThis wish for a “between space,” somewhere sacred and apart from the present, halfway between the past and the future, where time is all one and all time is beautiful reminded me a great deal of T.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. Macfarlane's first two books, Mountains of the Mind (2003) and The Wild Places (2007), were published to huge acclaim and have achieved the status of modern classics. The Old Ways joins up with them to form what Macfarlane calls "a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart". That definition is striking. It takes some courage for a writer to say that his subject is "the human heart". It sounds a little old-fashioned, a little out-of-step with modern detachment. But that is part of what makes Macfarlane's voice significant. He willingly declares his love of things. He brings his powerful intelligence to bear on the need to express sentiments and sensations. Macfarlane's way of looking and describing is shaped by two men in particular. In one chapter he takes his bearings from the watercolourist Eric Ravilious, "a votary of whiteness and remoteness, and a visionary of the everyday". Taking to his skis somewhere north of Swindon, Macfarlane experiences the Marlborough Downs – via Ravilious – as a variation on the Arctic. Ravilious spent most of his working life not on chalk downland but in Essex; he is, to my mind, just as brilliant when painting cucumber frames in a greenhouse as when he renders the chill of ice. But Macfarlane's version of him brings out qualities I would never have seen. Macfarlane explores the meditative aspects of being a pedestrian not so much a travelogue as a travel meditation, it favors lush prose, colorful digressions 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. "The Seattle Times" Best of all are the descriptions of the people who accompany Macfarlane, or whom he meets along the way(s), as though he effortlessly, lovingly distills the essence of each person into a few sentences. There's the artist Steve Dilworth, who reminds Macfarlane that "a shaman who took himself seriously would be insufferable" (171). Of David Quentin, with whom he traversed the Broomway, he writes:

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

So much of this is written so, so beautifully, and I wanted to love it, but again there were just a few... off things that tempered that potential for me. Main The book is a nice mix of personal reflection, narration, and history. Included are extended anecdotes about other great "walkers," including the painter Eric Ravilious and the poet Edward Thomas, both victims of wars.

Success!

One of the fascinating characters encountered is a man named Finlay MacLeod, a Celtic original--a historian on the Isle of Lewis, as well as a naturalist, novelist, broadcaster, oral historian, occasional "selkie-singer" & seal summoner, someone who has devoted his life to exploration, archiving & mapping the archipelago. MacLeod is said to have the same restless curiosity as his hero Darwin, being "only interested in everything."

Robert Macfarlane - Penguin Books UK Robert Macfarlane - Penguin Books UK

Word maps of sea routes occur in scaldic poetry & area also folded into the Icelandic sagas, containing Landtoninger (landmarks) in the 14th century Book of Settlements, whose 100 chapters tell the story of Iceland by the Vikings & include guides to the verstrveger, or western roads of the Atlantic that led from Norway to the Orkneys, Scotland, the Hebrides & Ireland as well as to the Faeroe Islands, Iceland & Greenland, using poetic logbooks or routiers& portolani for trans-oceanic passage crossings.All of this can become rather tedious at times, rather like the adage about asking someone the time & receiving a long discourse on the history of watchmaking. However, when Macfarlane is actively putting one foot in front of the other, describing scenery & folks encountered along the way The Old Ways is quite definitely a distinct joy to read.But even despite my poor reading plan the power of his passion was enough to carry me through, as he tells us over and over to take one more look, just one, at what we have around us, and does it with such a lovely passion that it is usually not a strain to listen one more time: The concept that “the earliest stories are told not in print but footprint” is brought home by a walk on a beach where erosion of each tide uncovers prehistoric footprints preserved in the mud. He walks in the path of a hunter and spies prints left by playing children. He makes a wonderful digression on the anatomy of feet: A wonderfully meandering account of the author’s peregrinations and perambulations through England, Scotland, Spain, Palestine, and Sichuan…Macfarlane’sparticular gift is his ability to bring a remarkably broad and varied range of voices to bear on his own pathways and to do so with a pleasingly impressionist yet tenderly precise style.”—Aengus Woods, themillions.com

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane: 9780147509796

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. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot's phrase, can 'enlarge the imagine range for self to move in'. Each chapter of The Old Ways is composed of many short passages built up like little cairns, or strewn like shards of china clay. In memory they keep forming new alignments. The making of new maps – both of narrative and of land – is one of Macfarlane's enduring fascinations. His project in The Wild Places was partly spurred by a realisation that for most of us the map of Britain is the road map. He set out to trace an archipelagic map so different from the AA atlas that it was almost beyond recognition. In The Old Ways he studies Britain geologically, exploring the relation between peat and gneiss, chalk and sand, asking how we can learn to understand the country differently. McFarlane finds further roots for his mode of thinking in the romanticism of George Burrow in the mid-19th century and early environmentalism of John Muir toward the end of the century. But as with classic travel books, he takes delight in the inspiration of the colorful, living people he meets on his journeys. His story is enriched as he expands his line of thinking to seaways and riverways. 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.K. at the time--the sea as gateway. A visit to ancient pilgrim paths in Spain and Tibet rounds out the wonderful journeys in this book.This book is a meditation on how journeys are never just about getting from one place to another. Every land or seascape poses vistas to observe, problems to overcome, and reminders of deep time. Although most of the trips he describes take place in the British Isles, he goes as far afield as Palestine and Tibet. For me, in fact, those distant walks were the most interesting part of the book. In Palestine you have to break the law just to live, and in Tibet the sheer struggle for survival seems to highlight the majesty of limitless mountains and endless time.