The Wild Places (Landscapes)

You don't have to live in or know the British Isles to appreciate this extraordinary book. This is neither a travelogue nor an environmental polemic, but a rich exploration of what it means for a place to be wild. In between the beautiful descriptions of places and wildlife are numerous meditations about such topics as the meaning of maps, migration, and the author's evolving perception of what constitutes wildness. The book made me pause often in deep thought and deep passion, with an urge to apply Macfarlane's manner of observation to the wild-ish places where I live. To me, it's a book to read and think about at a walker's pace, one chapter at a time.

Beechwood to Beechwood. The first book of Robert Macfarlane's that I read, almost a year ago now, was The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot . 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 The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (Dover Earth Science) 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 Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain . 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.

Robert Macfarlane here takes us on a noble and quixotic quest, to find "wild" places in the British Isles as well as Ireland. For any person who has lived or even visited almost anywhere there recently, it is obvious what an odd task the author has set before him in the isle of the roundabout (Americans read : "Traffic Circle"), the roads of which, by his own concession, if laid end to end, could take one almost to the moon. The author - somewhat shamefacedly - uses these roads to get to his wild destinations. It becomes evident that one is reading the work of a poetic stylist on the first page where: "Sunlight fell in bright sprees on the floor." All very well, but - I'm not trying to be hypercritical here, just taking note of the tenor of the book as it struck this reader - the book is more of a compendium of MacFarlane's excursions and varied and varying impressions of "wildness," as he motors back and forth from his home in Cambridge (where he is a Fellow) with wife and children to various remote corners for his encounters, only to rush back home to write about the place, the history of the place, the authors associated with the place and his interaction with the place in cosy Cambridge. The book is chock-full of these other writers and paragraph-long quotes from them, which let us know how erudite our author is, but not how wise. There IS a difference, you know. There's a certain thread of mystical "Wildness Manichaeism," if I may so phrase it, which runs through a great deal of the book. It's wild or it's not, no greys. The author describes his experience of wildness (and that of many other authors) in several different places. But there's a heartfelt reluctance to define it. Macfarlane's wildness is definitely of the "I know it when I sense it" sort. The most illustrative passage of this is his experience in the Basin in the Scottish Highlands: "To be in the Basin, even briefly, is to be reminded of the narrow limits of human perception, of the provisionality of your assumptions about the world. In such a place, your conventional units of chronology (the century, the life-span, the decade, the year, the day, the heartbeat) become all but imperceptible, and your individual gestures and impulses (the lift of a hand, the swimming stroke taken within water, the flash of anger, a turn of speech or thought) acquired an eerie quickness. The larger impulses of the human world - its wars, civilisations, eras - seem remote. Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend....The Basin keeps wild time." While in search of wild time, Macfarlane informs us of many a thing of erudite interest, such as (in his ophthalmological discourse on noctambulation): "It takes rod cells up to two hours to adapt most fully to the dark. Once the body detects reduced light levels, it begins generating a photosensitive chemical called rhodopsin, which builds up in the rod cells in a process known as dark adaptation." All very fascinating, I'm sure you'll agree. But, still, inasmuch as there is a theme here it is Macfarlane's quest for the type of experience he quotes author Stephen Graham as having: "As you sit on a hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens." Macfarlane doesn't hang about long enough for the great door to open for him. But this book constitutes an often fascinating series of jaunts in search of it.

Mochte ich sehr gern, hat aber nicht so richtig gezogen

As usual this author came up trumps. A really interesting book to dip into

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.

What a lovely read. I wanted to set up and sleep in the hollows and fields then wake up in new places where the author did so.

A well written informative, magical travel log, best in years.