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Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes) Paperback – Illustrated, September 24, 2013

by Robert Macfarlane (Author)

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Book 3 of 3: Landscapes

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The acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland examines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move

Chosen by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years

In this exquisitely written book, which folds together natural history, cartography, geology, and literature, Robert Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell. Macfarlane’s journeys take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. He matches strides with the footprints made by a man five thousand years ago near Liverpool, sails an open boat far out into the Atlantic at night, and commingles with walkers of many kinds, discovering that paths offer a means not just of traversing space but also of feeling, knowing, and thinking.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

September 24, 2013
Dimensions

0.86 x 5.25 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0147509793
ISBN-13

978-0147509796
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for The Old Ways:

“With a steady command of the literature and history of each place he visits, [Macfarlane] tries ‘to read landscapes back into being.’ His sentences bristle with the argot of cartographers, geologists, zoologists, and botanists.” —The New Yorker

“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

“A backpack of assorted expeditions charted by a writer whose poetic and scientific skills are equal to one another…there are some splendid set pieces.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A wonderfully meandering account of the author’s peregrinations and perambulations through England, Scotland, Spain, Palestine, and Sichuan…Macfarlane’s particular 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

"Macfarlane seems to know and have read everything…his every sentence rewrites the landscape in language crunchy and freshly minted and deeply textured. Surely the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years." —Pico Iyer

"Luminous, possessing a seemingly paradoxical combination of the dream-like and the hyper-vigilant, The Old Ways is, as with all of Macfarlane's work, a magnificent read. Each sentence can carry astonishing discovery." —Rick Bass

“In Macfarlane, British travel writing has a formidable new champion… Macfarlane is read above all for the beauty of his prose and his wonderfully innovative and inventive way with language…he can write exquisitely about anywhere.” —William Dalrymple, The Observer

“In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made…the walking of paths is, to [Macfarlane], an education, and symbolic, too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing, wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and behind.” —Alexandra Harris, The Guardian

About the Author

Robert Macfarlane is the author of a prizewinning quartet of books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, and Landmarks. He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (September 24, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0147509793
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0147509796
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.86 x 5.25 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #125,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #102 in Ecotourism Travel Guides
- #249 in Nature Writing & Essays
- #453 in Travel Writing Reference

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Robert Macfarlane

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Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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The Road(s) not taken...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 13, 2013

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... as with campsites, there are so many roads still left to be taken, and so little time. Robert Macfarlane has written a rich, evocative paean to the pleasures of travel at the optimum speed for savoring the world around us; the sub-title proclaims the method - on foot (though a slow boat does also make its appearances). For me, the book "worked" on many different levels. There is the plain "goad" to get out on the trail, and there are so many that he describes. There was the sheer enjoyment of experiencing Macfarlane's remarkable erudition. To read can be to learn, and in this book there was so much that is new, exciting and unknown to me... another "goad," an intellectual one. And even for a native English speaker... or more properly, as my British "cousins" would remind me, American speaker, an Oxford Dictionary is an appropriate accompaniment so that the reader can look up the meaning of so many of the technical terms of geology, botany, nautical, et al., that Macfarlane uses with confidence. History, literature and philosophy are also woven into the author's musing while walking. He quotes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (Oxford World's Classics) : "I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs." And then there are those essential but unlikely connections humans make among themselves, and are the wiser for it.

Macfarlane groups his walks into four major sections, located in England, Scotland, "Abroad" and finishing with England again. He commences with a walk in the snow, near the time of the winter solstice, from his home in Cambridge. The reader is soon introduced to Edward Thomas, who wrote The Icknield Way in 1913. Macfarlane takes part of the Icknield, which extends from Norfolk to Wiltshire, on the south coast. It is an area of chalk, and the path is one of England's oldest roads. He then takes what is billed as "deadliest" path in Britain: the Broomway, which crosses a tidal estuary in East Anglia. The author says that the trail is a "halfway house" between the land and the sea, a fitting introduction to his boat trips in Scotland, mainly near the Outer Hebrides. There are "paths" in the ocean that have been used for millennium, and he encourages the reader to conceptualize looking at a "negative" of the normal map of Europe; it is the edge(s) from northern Scotland all the way to Spain that had more in common with each other than they did with the inhabitants only 30 km inland. The Atlantic "country." He "illuminated" for me the rituals and traditions involved with the hunting of gannets on a "speck" of an island to the north of the Hebrides, Sula Sgeir.

Macfarlane's three "abroad" trips are varied, and impressive. Concerning the unlikely connections in life, he knows Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape , a book I read (and reviewed) four years ago. Macfarlane visits Shehadeh, who is an excellent guide to walking those ancient hills, and the trials and tribulations that hikers in many countries do not experience. The second hike is in Spain, a portion of the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, coming from Madrid over the Guadarrama mountains into Segovia. And the third hike is in Western Tibet, near the mountain sacred to the Buddhists, the triangular Minya Konka.

Back in England, Macfarlane discusses the life of the painter Ravilious, as well as his walking habits. Then he returns for a deeper look at Edward Thomas: "Thomas sensed early that one of modernity's most distinctive tensions would be between mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other- with the former becoming ubiquitous and the latter becoming lost (if ever it had been possible) and reconfigured as nostalgia... It is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires." I was fascinated by the author's descriptions of a friendship between Thomas and Robert Frost, with the latter visiting him on occasions. Frost sent him a draft of "The Road Not Taken" which may have been inspired by Thomas' actions. At the age of 36, with a family, Thomas enlisted, and was killed in the Battle of Arras in the spring of 1917. I couldn't help think of the line from the movie Doctor Zhivago , uttered at the commencement of World War I, by his half-brother, Yevgraf: "Happy men don't enlist."

Macfarlane peppers his work with numerous bon-mots. Consider, as a symbol of hospitality and friendship: "A self-replenishing tumbler of gin." There is also a wonderful bibliography worth exploring. Neither Frost nor Macfarland raised the issue that, if the mortar round doesn't get you, you might live long enough to double back, and take the road that you missed the first time around. For Macfarlane's wonderful account and inspiration, 6-stars.

4 people found this helpful

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Your Old Auntie

White male-centric, wish I could overlook it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2020

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Let’s be clear up front, I did enjoy this book as well as Mountains of the Mind. I am even gaining insight and knowledge from Underland. In these three books, I have found that MacFarlane embodies both the best and the worst of 19th and early 20th Century natural history writers and explorers: the best in his introduction of the reader to new ways of thinking about the natural world, and the worst in his perpetuation of white male-centricity found in those earlier writings.
In all three books, women are merely appendages or afterthoughts in his interactions/explorations. For example, in The Old Ways, he reads Nan Shepherd, but her insights are only valid as they confirm or are confirmed by men. Women do not physically or literally participate in his perambulations. This is an all-male pursuit.
Likewise, the ‘native’ is elided from consideration: becomes an object of observation and comment, but is not ‘one of us’: the white men making whatever trek he is involved in. An egregious example of this is in the chapter titled ‘Ice’. On page 265 he says, “There would be two tents, two ponies and four people,” one of whom is a Tibetan horseman. He then proceeds to describe the three white men, and we hear nothing more about the fourth man until page 271, where we get a westerner’s description of him and his household, after which he gets a a few more sentences about taking care of the horses and chanting mantras. Apparently he has nothing to contribute to the philosophical insights gained from the two white men.
Women also have nothing worth adding to the conversation. On page 226, as the Palestinian woman is explaining her connection to the land and her grief at losing it, he says, “I stopped listening. Down in the valley, a covey of partridges broke from cover...”
Even neolithic women are unimportant. He begins chapter 16, ‘Print’, “Footprints in the mud: two sets of prints, walking northwards. A man and a woman, companionably close, moving together...” The woman gets some acknowledgement in the first paragraph but by the second has been elided: “I set my foot by the side of the first print of the man, and then I walk north, keeping pace, and stride with him as he goes...”(359). “Northwards, the man and I...”(363).
He describes the couple, in the first paragraph, as “journeying, not foraging.” But apparently, she’s no longer needed on this journey.
As I said, I did, overall, enjoy these books, even though they are permeated with implicit race and gender bias. To give MacFarlane his due, he is likely unconscious of this and would likely be shocked and horrified to realize he is doing it. Nevertheless, despite the wonderful and inspiring things he has written in these books, the biases leave a bitter taste.

118 people found this helpful

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Mrs Beetle

It depends on your worldview

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2020

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The Old Ways – the title is a double-entendre, yet Macfarlane is careful to erase thought of much of what the old ways were, in both meanings of the word, namely religion, especially the vestiges of the Judeo-Christian tradition. On a (part) pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he starts the chapter by confiding that the word pilgrim “has become tainted with a tiresome piety” and he is always at pains to nearly hide how very tiresome he finds piety himself. He studiously keeps his observations off of any thoughts of what St James might be, or the medieval idea of what that pilgrim route was for, even as he passes scallop shells left to mark it. His a determinedly secular and material spirit.

He tries to find religion in the landscape – alone, doing exactly what he wants with the self-assured satisfaction that his tiny observations of rock and birds will be enough. He hovers around a desire to lose his humanity, to erase it by going barefoot feeling the ground beneath his feet like an animal. He meets people on the way, an atheist in the Outer Hebrides who makes totems for a religion that doesn’t exist (think wicker man) and is snotty about the local faith. In Palestine, he meets a Palestinian lawyer and walker and holds his nose at the thought of its history. What of ancient pilgrim routes to Jerusalem? Charles Darwin is a favourite walking model.

In Ireland, he notes ancient funeral tracks and imagines the weight of the coffin and stopping for rest, but nothing of the wider beliefs about life and death and faith in a God. For him, there is no need for such untasteful piety, rather he anchors himself in the cosiness of his privileged selfishness (free to wander wherever he wants) and all is a self-conscious surface observation that leaves you cold in the end.

78 people found this helpful

Brier

Elitist clap trap

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 24, 2020

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Supposedly a book about walking ancient routes. 20% of the book consists of references to other works. 50% of the rest is a eulogy to the life and works of a long dead war poet who apparently abused his wife and children. What remains is self indulgent, elitist and overwrought. I bought this as a Kindle deal and paid very little. It was much too expensive.

46 people found this helpful

H. Drouin

One of the few books I've ever given up on. Full of self indulgent waffle.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 1, 2020

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I'm an avid walker and fell runner, and an avid reader. I don't often give up on a book. Imagine my surprise when getting even to the midpoint of this book was a struggle, and I gave it away to a friend without finishing it. Macfarlane seems to forget what the point of this book is. It meanders from lengthy descriptions of his walks (with zero focus on any history), to telling us about modern artists in great detail (cracking open a rock in an ancient stone circle to hide a skeleton in it?!), to reminding us of his obsession with some long-dead writers who he evidently worships. He would have been better off writing their biographies, since they make such frequent appearances. Macfarlane's writing is undeniably prosaic, but unnecessarily so. His editor should have spent more time removing the unnecessary overly-prosaic waffle that litters this book, but then nothing of any substance would be left behind. I really cannot understand why this book has received so many excellent reviews.

21 people found this helpful

Pete Cowell

Numinous Brilliance

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 26, 2016

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In The Old Ways, Dr Macfarlane praises the tracks, sea-roads and forgotten paths which traverse collective memory. Infused with literary allusions, humour and a gentle sense of melancholy, this admirable work disregards romantic nations and clichés about the countryside, and sets out, with stout stick in hand, to tell the stories of the past that linger on in the lives and lines of memory which still score our landscape.

You might consider buying a pair of walking boots, too.

48 people found this helpful

clive stocks

Beautifully written with a fluency and use of words that ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 1, 2015

Verified Purchase

This is a remarkable book.Beautifully written with a fluency and use of words that is astonishing.If you like walking, reading books about places, people, nature and landscapes then buy it. I have a very lovely hard copy version which I love. This book makes me want to go out and wander the old roads and paths of England, Scotland and Spain. Makes you hunger for walking the open roads and paths of Britain , especially the South Downs, Scottish Islands of Lewis and the Icknield Way. He is a very well read, erudite and expressive writer who uses language that I never knew existed.

It opens your mind to the exhilaration of walking the old pathways, roads and tracks that cross Southern England and Scotland particularly. He seems to have been inspired by Edward Thomas, the poet, Laurie Lee and other travel writers who have walked the old paths of England. This is the best book I have ever read on walking, travelling, and the fascination of landscapes, nature, geography, topography, archeology, history, mixed in with poetry and the voices of people who have travelled these roads in the past.

In summary, beautiful, fascinating, inspiring, thoughtful, and one of my favourite books ever. I will buy his other books, eespecially Mountains of the Mind and I am sure will enjoy this just as much. Just buy it and enjoy it slowly one chapter and walk a day.It is like good wine that needs to be savoured and sipped carefully.

Clive Stocks

52 people found this helpful

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