The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Product Information

The way-marking of old paths is an esoteric lore of its own, involving cairns, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, longstones, milestones, cromlechs and other guide-signs. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape.

The Old Ways - Paths The Old Ways - Paths

And it is an affirmation of their connectedness as part of a great network linking ways and wayfarers of every sort. My favorite treks with him were through England and Scotland, as he relates history, anecdotes and the natural beauty surrounding him. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. My mind beat back north against the current, thinking of the puffins' flight, the lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep.In his chapter on walking in the Himalayas, he quotes a companion on the concept of darshan, a Sanskrit word that "suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth; with a physical manifestation of the holy", and we are reminded that the Sherpas who accompanied the first expeditions had no word to describe the summit of a mountain, as that was where the gods lived, so it would be blasphemous even to try to reach one. It is difficult, given the set-up, structure, content and highly-educated British nature of it all, not to compare MacFarlane’s journey to that other erudite, epic walker of British extraction, Leigh Fermor. But here, unlike in Mountains of the Mind, Macfarlane is more interested in passes and paths than in summits. He coins the word "xenotopia" to describe an uncanny landscape, and for my money the part of the book that nails this concept best, and which will get you irrevocably hooked on his writing, is when he travels the Broomway, a contingent path along tidal sands between Wakering Stairs and Foulness in Essex, unearthly in both the literal and figurative senses, and said to be the most dangerous path in Britain.

The Old Ways - Penguin Books UK

Those places live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality and such places retreated to most often when we are most remote from them are among the most important landscapes we possess.He quotes that little snippet from a past age of botanical expertise as a kind of public self-reproach. In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made. I also think that his clear passion for each of his subjects is crystal clear, but mostly conveyed in a way that suggests that this adds to his knowledge and supports his thesis, rather than detracting from it. I really enjoyed his style of writing, which felt immersive, though the pace of the book was sedate. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.