Holloway has been on my shelf for years. Like Simon Armitage’s Blossomise, it’s a chapbook, more or less, published by Faber and Faber, with illustrations by Stanley Donwood. Its brevity, and the thought that it would fit into my carry-on bag on this trip to Ontario, prompted me to bring it with me.
A holloway is a path, worn into soft bedrock by “centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll & rain-run.” They’re unique to the UK and other parts of Europe. As Macfarlane (and perhaps Richards as well—it’s a collaboration, the result of multiple voices coming together) tell us,
They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to the other old paths & tracks in the landscape—ways that still connect place to place & person to person.
The paragraph that follows is a list of words that denote holloways of various kinds and suggest their literal qualities and the intimations of the occult that they carry. The chapbook explores both through brief accounts of the history of these paths, the experiences of others who have walked them (notably the poet Edward Thomas), and the authors’ own odd encounters with mist and fog during their excursions to South Dorset’s holloways. Macfarlane’s twin fascinations—landscape and language—are on display here, as elsewhere in his writing.
The notion of collective authorship is reinforced by the insertion of italicized text, sometimes historical (the language is obviously from earlier centuries), sometimes quotations from Thomas’s poetry, sometimes impossible to identify: found text, dialogue, I don’t know. The effect is a layering of past and present, literal and magical, which is the point being made about these odd, ancient paths.
Two journeys are related in Holloway. In the first, Macfarlane and his friend, the writer Roger Deakin, explore the Chideock Valley’s holloways using Geoffrey Household’s 1937 novel Rogue Male as a guidebook, a charming bit of rural psychogeography. In the second, Macfarlane, Donwood, and Richards return to the area five years after Deakin’s untimely death. I found myself envying the playfulness of these visits, the joy the men have together, as well as the language in which their experiences are evoked, which shifts from prose to prose poetry to poetry.
Macfarlane writes about holloways in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and I wondered if there would be a lot of crossover between this chapbook and that longer study, but I didn’t notice much, although I didn’t bring The Old Ways along to check. Would it matter? Not to me. I loved the writing in this chapbook. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. Maybe someday I’ll get to see a Holloway for myself.