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.