Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature by Chris Yates

Yates has used a simple and effective framework, a walk over one night on the North Downs. Although a well known fisherman and writer on the subject, once a year in summer he gets the urge to walk out under the stars and keep moving throughout the night. This book is a record of a single walk but also reflections on his childhood within nature, encounters both on the night and previously with wildlife and their habitats at night, and the differences in quality between night and day.

I was initially a little irritated with Yates' need to name rather than just be within his environment, but his lyrical prose and evocation of all the things that make me need to be in and around the natural environment had be utterly captivated by the end. To me, this is an important addition to the nature writing genre, many books have been written about walking but this is the first I've read about the unique qualities of our night time environment.

Mountains of the Mind: A History of A Fascination by Robert McFarlane

A wonderful read that is not just for those who feel the need to climb higher and go further than others have gone before, but also for those like me who are content to learn about the seemingly contradictory addictive drive for glory and zen like pursuit of inner enlightenment that makes up that drive.  This is not just a well written book about mountains, it is about how Western society has changed its attitudes towards mountains through history.  McFarlane speaks of the early accounts of travellers and revelations of Romanticism with its reverence for the sublime and wild, high and remote places.  He speaks of our changing in understanding, from mountains as an antediluvian remnant to the current understanding of deep time and the enormous geological processes that have thrust mountain ranges up and the glacial processes that have worn them down.  This is a truly wonderful book that, as with all of McFarlane's, pivots around the life of a man, in this case Mallory, the man who died on his third attempt to climb Everest, and his internal struggle between beloved wife and the drive to reach the summit.

Pigeon by Barbara Allen

This is my first of the Reaktion series of monographs on individual species of animals and I was pleasantly surprised, I expected the book to be quite slight and received a lovely heavy 230 odd page book that fits nicely in the hand and is full of colour and monochrome illustrations and photographs.

Pigeons are a much maligned species, villified as 'rats with wings', as pests in interesting contrast to their albino versions, doves. They live in such close communion with us, exchanging their natural habitat of cliff faces for the vertical faces of our cities, that they are easily overlooked. They are assumed to be stupid and dirty, but the truth is very different.

Allen takes us through chapters on the physiology and natural history of pigeons and doves, their social life, intelligence, the physical mutability which made them beloved of Darwin and other pigeon fanciers, and their ability to home. She identifies the history of doves and pigeons in literature, religion and mythology and examines their relationship with humans, as food and as messengers. Her final chapter is on the pigeon species humans have driven to extinction: the dodo, solitaires, and the passenger pigeon, not from competition but rather wholesale slaughter.

There is some repetition between chapters, but in all this was a really enjoyable education, pigeons have companioned humans since the beginning of built civilization and this book elegantly explores how the relationship between bird and human has evolved right up to the present day.

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane completes his trilogy of nature writing with a meditation on walking. It can be read seperately but dovetails beautifully with its companions. MacFarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was an exploration of how the cultural concept of mountains has changed over time. The second, The Wild Places, of the concept of wilderness and our need to reach for it. This third book, The Old Ways, speaks of the lost pathways that were used by our ancestors and are almost, but not quite, forgotten, like lost plague villages visible from the air as marks in a field. 

The book is divided into four parts, each covering a different geographical set of wanderings. 

The first section is of MacFarlane's journeys in England, as he traces the Icknield Way from his home outside Cambridge to the Downs and walks the 'most dangerous path in Britain': the Broomway tidal road across the Maplin Sands alongside Foulness Island, traversing holloways, chalk paths and a Roman Road, sleeping out to be woken by skylarks, crunching in the snow and striding toe to toe with his own reflection across wet sands.

Next he goes north to his beloved Scotland, exploring the trackless motorway of the sea road through the Minches to the Shiants, Rona and Sula Sgeir and across peat and granite moors, reflecting on a post glacial landscape ground out by the ice and bearing the signs of early human occupation. 

In the third part MacFarlane travels abroad to walk in Palestine, to follow part of the Camino pilgrim road in Spain and the pilgrim route around the feet of Minya Konka in Western Tibet, the most sacred mountain in Buddhism. In these less familiar landscapes his writing takes on a tone of wonder at new fauna, flora, weather, people and political strictures.

Finally he homes and returns to following the Ridgeway across Marlborough Downs, the South Downs to Eastbourne, circling in a gyre around a subject that McFarlane touches on again and again before focusing on it in the closing chapters. The life of Edward Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, poet, depressive and compulsive walker is addressed directly in 'Ghost', an account of Thomas' life with his wife Helen and his use of walking as a curative for his raging depressions. In the very last chapter MacFarlane opens out again and shows us the evanescent prints of early humans walking across a mud flat, now revealed by the tides. 

MacFarlane's book is not easy to categorise, it mediates on many aspects, some connected with walking such as the drive of wanderlust and the push of the curious mind, some with the wandering trails the mind takes on such a journey, of geology, deep time, human history, companionship, solitude and spirituality. Another wonderful book by an author I turn to with delight.

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie

Jamie writes in a spare uncompromising style in this set of essays about landscape and her travels through some of the most remote parts of it. She shows us things most of us will not see, icebergs, the aurora from the Arctic circle, killer whales off the remote abandoned islands of St Kilda and Rona, cave drawings, and the estuary like view of human cells down a microscope in a pathology lab. What links the essays is a search for wilderness but Jamie is never cliched, never glorifying 'the wild' as something pure that we should attain to, but taking each experience as and of itself, never fearing to be crude or uncomplimentary. There are so many books about our experiences with nature that anything new to the canon needs to say something new, and Jamie does.

What I found curious was her urge to search for wildness, people do seem drawn to try and find the most remote 'untouched' landscapes, but that's to mistake what is before you.  I was at the Coop yesterday, just beside it the Dighty Burn flows out from a culvert, it's come from the Panbride Estate and past our house before getting there.  Beside the burn a tree leans over with grasses and bulbs at it's feet.  It's picturesque and a glimpse of wilderness in its own way, the small, as well as the epic, can be wild.