Robert Macfarlane and the Old Ways

I started to read Robert Macfarlane’s book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, while we were on the plane to England and I finished it while we were walking the Cotswold Way. I couldn’t have picked a better time to read it. Macfarlane writes about the ancient footpaths and sea lanes in and around the UK, as well as in Spain, Tibet and the West Bank. His prose is beautiful and poetic and his adventures on foot and in small boats are entertaining and illuminating. It is supposed to be the final volume in “a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart,” but I haven’t read the first two books, Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, and I don’t think you need to before picking up The Old Ways. I was so impressed by The Old Ways, though, that I intend to read the first two books as soon as possible. I can’t keep up with my “to read” pile and I blame Macfarlane for adding two more volumes to it.

Macfarlane goes on adventures large (climbing mountains in winter) and small (sleeping out in just a sleeping bag in a country noted for its rain) and then tells us about them. I learned a tremendous amount from his journeys. I learned the word “holloway,” for instance. A holloway is a path that has been walked so much that, over time, it has become etched deep into the ground. These, according to Macfarlane, are particularly common in the parts of England where the underlying rock is chalk, but I’ve experienced them in Spain, too, and even in the Cotswolds, on hills where erosion from rain and run-off has helped to deepen the footpath. So I’d experienced holloways before knowing that there was a word for them. Nor did I know that, on the West Bank, it is illegal, and dangerous, for Palestinians to walk in the countryside. You never know who you will run into on those paths: armed settlers or Palestinian fighters, or military patrols. But Macfarlane’s friend Raja, with whom he walks, is determined not to be frightened away from his sarha, an untranslatable word that suggests going for a stroll but carries with it implications or escape, delight, improvisation, and “smuggled connotations of the spiritual.” When Raja first started walking in the 1960s, his sarha was unimpeded, safe; now it has become anything but. However, as Macfarlane writes, “As walking had become less easy, it had become correspondingly more important to him–a way of defeating the compression of space of the Occupation; a small but repeated act of civil disobedience.”

Closer to home, Macfarlane walks repeatedly along the Icknield Way, one of the oldest roads in the United Kingdom, which runs along a chalk escarpment from Norfolk to Wiltshire. He also walks the Broomway, also known as the “Doomway,” a path across tidal flats between Essex and an island called Foulness. It’s supposed to be the most dangerous walking path in England, because it’s easy to get disoriented (especially when its foggy), and since the tide comes in faster than a person can run, you can easily find yourself in serious trouble. For Macfarlane, the Broomway is utterly strange and, for that reason, impossible to resist. In fact, after his successful navigation of this bizarre, dangerous path, he immediately makes plans to walk it again, the next time at night.

The Old Ways isn’t just about Macfarlane’s journeys (and, by extension, those of his friends). It’s also about other writers whose work focuses on or was deeply influenced by walking, most of all the poet Edward Thomas, whose work I had never heard of before reading this book. Thomas was a walker–it helped him manage the black moods that often overcame him–and his writing was deeply influenced by his walking. For Thomas, according to Macfarlane, “Landscape and nature are not there simply to be gazed upon; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways–both perplexing and perforating us.” Again I add another set of books to the teetering stack that I intend to read.

Inside the front cover of the paperback edition is a list of 15 writers for whom The Old Ways was the book of the year when it was published–including John Banville, Antony Beevor, and Jan Morris. I don’t belong in such august company but I would have to say The Old Ways is one of the best books I’ve read this year and I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the complex relationship between ourselves and the landscapes through which we move.