Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award
Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.
Author, Money for Nothing, and much else. Professing science writing at MIT. Servant to Tikka & Champ. @tomlevenson@mastodon.online & @tomlevenson.bsky.social
@IBJIYONGI Dorothy Sayers, "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club;" Gwyn MacFarlane "Alexander Fleming;" Robert MacFarlane (no rel., I believe) "The Wild Places." Just bought and dipping into "Merits of the Plague" by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani.
Living slowly, noticing more. Optimistic. Field Notes for Curious Minds, Sundays 6pm. Creating an #EncouragementFarm Writing ‘Encourage Meant’ on Substack
Puck’s Gorge on the way to Dunoon. A magical place. On a misty, overcast day there’s an ethereal wildness about it. I’ve been reading ‘The Wild Places’ by @RobGMacfarlane and my mind is dancing around the many interpretations of ‘wild places’. https://t.co/SFLLYXxvN1
Media, tech, music, art & family. From Cambridge to Canada, via @WildBrainHQ, @WildBrain_spark, @britscreenforum & @cammusicfest
@tomskitomski Anything by Robert MacFarlane, but The Wild Places would be the best place to start. Brilliant, evocative writing about experiencing the outdoors / landscape. Perfect lockdown vicariousness.
"Macfarlane delivers crisp, engaging scenes . . . by the end of his peregrinations he had won me over completely." - Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe
"In this eloquent travelogue, Macfarlane explores the last undomesticated landscapes in Britain and Ireland in a narration that blends history, memoir, and meditation . . . His striking prose not only evokes each locale's physicality in sensuous, deliberate detail, it glows with a reverence for nature in general and takes the reader on both a geographical and a philosophical journey." - Publishers Weekly
"The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature'" -- Scotland on Sunday (UK)
"Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow'"--Sunday Times (London)
"Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again" --Metro (London)
"He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful" --Antony Gormley, artist