The Wild Places

So enjoying this book - did I mention that "I'm so enjoying this book." ... while I'm not in the author's landscape, my imagination is. And the additional commentary gets me thinking about how to interact with the landscape about me. Words matter - and his selection of words are oh so enjoyable! I think I mentioned I'm so enjoying this book.

I hadn't expected much from a 'wildlife and landscape' book, set mostly in Brtain and Ireland, but this is simply magnificent. [As are his 'Mountains of the Mind' and 'The Old Ways' both now avidly devoured]The descriptions are flawless, the prose crafted like a jewelled watch, and the vocabulary, oh the vocabulary - what a joy to read such a well-educated writer who really knows his stuff.I will restrain myself a while and then re-read it and the others. Then next year again for sure.Don't miss this if you love fine writing.

I was expecting far more nature and less history. No doubt more interesting for male readers, written from a male point of view.

als ein Bericht über persönliche Erfahrungen in Englands wilder Natur. Der Autor vertraut seinen eigenen Empfindungen so wenig, daß er dauernd durch Einschübe aus Sekundärliteratur und Zitaten den Erzählfluß unterbricht. Wertvoll ist allerdings der Hinweis auf Roger Deakins Bücher, die ihm ein Vorbild sein sollten!

Beechwood to Beechwood. The first book of Robert Macfarlane's that I read, almost a year ago now, was . As I do for truly exceptional books, I gave it a "6-star" rating, and knew I would be reading more of his works. With "The Wild Places" I was again dazzled, as well as humbled by this rich, well-written and informative work. Humbled? Yes, Macfarlane is still under 40, yet has the erudition of a well-educated and curious person twice his age. (It does make me even more regret all that time I wasted in committee meetings!) He knows the natural world - well - identifying the flora and fauna, not just as a bird watcher might, with guide in hand. It is like they are old acquaintances. He is on equally familiar terms with the inanimate world, the one of the land itself, its rocks and soil layers. Being in Britain, naturally there is a lot of water, in various forms and states of agitation. He weaves into his depictions of his travels to the remote parts of Britain, the stories of others who have lived there, and often traveled far from their native locales. Well-known writers are a mental companion for him, and they are frequently referenced. So too, some less well-known ones; Macfarlane has now placed Bagnold's on my reading list.The Sunday Times of London spoke of his precise prose. And so it is, as well as fresh. Right from the beginning, he draws the reader in with fresh expressions like "Rooks haggle." And he stirred some very dormant memories. How long ago was it since I'd routinely climb trees? Like most of us, just a kid, and for some inexplicable reason, I stopped. Macfarlane, in his thirties, can't resist, and continues, seeking out a favorite beech tree not that far from his home in Cambridge. Trees, and those who love them. Xerxes is normally depicted as one of the "bad guys" of history... a ruthless "oriental" despot, off to crush those freedom-living Greek states. Maybe so, but Macfarlane relates that he loved sycamore trees, and would stop his entire army on the march, to savor some particularly appealing ones.Macfarlane structures his work around various geographical features, such as island, valley, moor, forest, river-mouth, cape, ridge, holloway, storm-beach, saltmarsh and tor. The seeming exception is "grave,", but in ways it fits, as the author describes a peninsula in County Claire, in the west of Ireland, and the limestone features, some composed of human bones from the millenniums of burials there, which includes those who died in the 1840's as a result of famine. The author presents a chilling account of the cynicism of the landowners that were indifferent to these deaths. Likewise, in the chapter entitled "River-Mouth" I found his depictions of "the Clearances" enlightening (the landowners in northern Scotland forcibly relocated entire villages in order to enhance their ability to graze sheep.) Seeing those "pleasant" pastoral scenes of sheep grazing today, Macfarlane notes: "a caution against romanticism and blitheness."My first experience with a "Holloway" was walking a section of the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. Less than half a century of travel on the Trace had depressed the road surface at least 6 feet in some areas. With thousands of years of travel along foot and animal paths in Britain, Holloways literally crisscross the isles, but are also largely "invisible." He actively seeks them out, with his own "maps" of the terrain, so different from road maps that give us a very one-dimensional picture of the countryside.The author sleeps out in the open, in remote places, and no doubt is more "alive" for doing so, truly feeling the natural world. He rarely complains about adverse conditions, and if so, only wryly and obliquely: "But you never mentioned the midges, Sweeney, I thought reproachfully..." (p.59). He quotes numerous American writers, including an icon of the American West, Wallace Stegner, on the importance of wild places to the human psyche.Roger Deakin was a life-long friend, and many of Macfarlane's travels were in his company. Deakin was another glorious eccentric, who appreciated the natural world. His most famous book is . Deakin left us far too early, a victim of an aggressive brain tumor, at the age of 63. An apt eulogy from Macfarlane: "He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth. Everything he owned was worn, used, re-used. If anyone would have known how to age well, it would have been Roger."Macfarlane end his book, coming full-circle, as the beginning of this review suggests: coming back to the Beechwoods. He quotes a poem by T.S. Eliot whose message is that we may explore far places, and in the end, see the familiar places for the first time. Likewise, Macfarlane realizes that the wild places are not just in the far off Outer Hebrides, but can also be quite close to his home in Cambridge. Another 6-star impressive work.

A beautiful book, recounting the author’s journeys through some of Britain’s wild places, sometimes alone, and sometimes accompanied by one or two close friends who share his love of the wild. The language of the book is spell-binding, taking the reader on a parallel journey, weaving science and literature, knowledge and wonder. .“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something that I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.”“Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky.”“Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.”“Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you not only understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land – it is also a quality which can settle on a place, with a snowfall, or with the close of day.”Read, and find yourself wanting to begin your own journey.