Reading Robert MacFarlane’s book was like learning how to walk again – walking like the most present-minded Buddhist on the earth after you’ve been awarded a university education and read thousands of books. MacFarlane is the most erudite lover of topography I’ve ever read. More knowledgeable than Thoreau's Walden, more interesting than Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, and more inspiring than a High Sierra trail guide, this book shows the reader a way to see while you're on the journey. Talking of war, many men returning from the first World War came home to England with no job or prospect of attaining reliable employment enough to support a family. 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. Plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys up and down the country as the woods became temporary homes to these shaken out casualties of conflict.” How tragic to give so much and then, come home to meander aimlessly without a purpose, or place to stay. 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. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it.

The Old Ways - Paths The Old Ways - Paths

I felt a sensation of candour and amplitude, of the body and mind opened up, of thought diffusing at the body's edges rather than ending at the skin.”

A wonderful book: Macfarlane has a rare physical intelligence, and his writing affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time Antony Gormley Short, nimble and bright-eyed, there is more than a hint of faery to Finlay. He has a crinkled smile and his shoulders shake when he laughs, which is often. He is constantly impious, though that doesn't stop him from taking things seriously. The only Christianity of which he approves was that which flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the island, a pre-Reformation worship in which pagan habits were mixed with Christian rites. (145)

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes): Macfarlane The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes): Macfarlane

His explorations have led him to include other walkers in his book such as George Borrow who “spent more than 40 years exploring England, Wales and Europe on foot.” He goes on to explain that “like many long-distance walkers he was a depressive […] walking became a means of out striding his sadness.” I too have found walking therapeutic to my soul. There is a humility to the act of the kora, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. Circle and circuit, potentially endless, stand against the symbolic finality of the summit. The pilgrim on the kora contents himself always with looking up and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto knowledge.” Macfarlane moves solo along the Outer Hebrides at times, occasionally sleeping in cave outcroppings while at other times taking refuge with area islanders, people who are themselves in many cases refugees from a more urban environment. He also takes part in a tenuous sea journey on a barely-seaworthy vessel. He expresses that often "voyages out become voyages in." A beautifully modulated call from the wild, that will ensorcell any urban prisoner wishing to break free.” ―Will Self 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:

What I like about this is that it helps me to see the land and the biosphere, feel the land and its life in my body, to relate myself to the land, even in memory, and in the future. As Naomi Klein puts it in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, love will save this place. And for many of Robert's fellow British, who have been (what Klein, again, calls) rootless consumers for most of our lives, feeling connected to the land (other than in a proprietorial or nationalistic way I guess) might be something we can't even remember, something we have to learn like a new language... 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. Adam Nicolson has written of the 'powerful absence[s]' that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest,warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance” I guess this book is all about the human in the land, about history, traces of other people, ancient and now. And maybe thinking into the land this way is awesome and helpful. In nature is excitement and sustenance and restoration, half a way out of the deadness and disaffection of our culture. 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