Book Review by Reidun D. Nuquist
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin Books, New York, 2012). 433 pp., $18.00 paperback.
This elegantly written book by Robert Macfarlane is about “how people understand themselves using landscape.” Or put another way, how “we are shaped by the landscape through which we move.”
This may sound abstract, but it is not. Macfarlane has his feet on the ground as he follows ancient walking paths in England, Scotland, Palestine, Spain and Tibet. He is an engaging and curious companion: you never know what will catch his eye, although geology and flora and fauna are high on his list.
Chapter headings reflect the surfaces he traverses: silt, peat, gneiss, ice, limestone, granite. The silty path is the perilous Broomway, an ancient public right of way on the Essex coast of England, in the past marked by bundles of sticks, hence the name. The Broomway is often wrapped in fog; over the centuries countless walkers have drowned, caught by an incoming tide.
The granite chapter focuses on the Cairngorm Mountains in the Scottish Highlands. Macfarlane pays tribute to his late grandfather Edward Peck, a diplomat and mountain climber, who retired to the area: “… it was my grandfather who had helped high country and wild places to cast their strong spells over me.” (Reading this, I thought of another British diplo- mat and mountaineer, James Bryce, who inspired the 1910 formation of the GMC.)
In Spain Macfarlane hikes a section of the Camino de Santiago. In Tibet he walks another pilgrim way, the stony, tortuous path followed by devout Buddhists to Minya Konka (24,790’): “I felt no desire at all to climb the mountain, glad only to have seen it … I made a pair of cairns.” It is the journey that counts.
Not all old ways are on land; some are seaways. In a chapter about water, Macfarlane sails to Sula Sgeir, a desolate rocky outcropping north of the Hebrides, where resilient Scots have slaughtered gannets for food for centuries. Today, the bird is a rare and costly delicacy, the hunt strictly controlled by quotas.
A fellow at a Cambridge college, Macfarlane is a walker and a scholar, and his book is enhanced by historical and literary references. Its guiding spirit is the nature poet and essayist Edward Thomas. In 1913 Thomas befriended Robert Frost, and they took what Frost called ‘talk-walkings’ together in Gloucester- shire. These inspired the famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” which Frost sent Thomas in draft. According to Macfarlane, Thomas misread the poem as “a parody of his indecisiveness over the question of the war.” Thomas enlisted, and died on a World War I battlefield in France.
Robert Macfarlane is a relative new- comer in a long line of fine travel writers that includes John Muir, John McPhee, Barry Lopez, and even Bill Bryson— whose adventures on the Appalachian Trail exasperated some seasoned GMC backpackers. The Old Ways is part of a loose trilogy of books “about landscape and the human heart.” The other volumes are Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination (2003) and The Wild Places (2007).
Reprinted with permission from Long Trail News, Fall 2014, p. 28