The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

Just before Christmas there was a post on the "Wild Camping" Facebook page that I am a member of that effectively challenged the notion that "wild camping" is possible on the overcrowded island that is Britain today. It provoked a lot of debate and, to my mind, a lot of comment was coloured by the kind of machismo that is all too prevalent amongst the type of camper who thinks that slinging a tarp over a branch and spending a night snoozing under the stars makes them Ray Mears! However, the basic point is one worth considering, wild camping hotspots like Angle and Sprinkling Tarn can at times seem as crowded as some valley campsites. It's a point that the eloquent and thought provoking Robert Macfarlane explores in this fascinating and inspiring book.
Macfarlane starts with the premise that "Time and again, wildness has been declared dead in Britain and Ireland", that humanity has touched every corner of our homeland and that therefore the landscape cannot be seen as wild in a way, say, such as Alaska or the Australian outback. He then sets out in the company of other outdoorsman such as the wild swimming evangelist, Roger Deakin (to whom the book is dedicated), to disprove this notion and find the wildness in the differing habitats and extremities of the country. Herein lies the beauty of this elegantly written account. Whilst surely nobody would dispute that areas such as Rannoch Moor and Cape Wrath have a genuine claim to wilderness, and Macfarlane's explorations of these areas are inspiring and revel in the lack of human footprint, in many ways the most interesting segments of the book is where he finds wilderness in areas far less remote and seemingly far more affected by human activity.
He explores the hedgerows of the Norfolk countryside nosing his way along Badger trod paths into the heart of thickets. The Holloways of Dorset, to which the author recently dedicated a new book, are explored, the comparison with other human landscapes reclaimed by nature is poignant and instructive, the wild rapidly reclaims that which we abandon. He delights in finding Mountain Hares on a windswept Tor in the heart of the Peak District, the most visited National Park in England hemmed in as it is by the industrial powerhouse cities of the North.
Macfarlane's explorations lead him to draw up an individual map of the wild spots of the country ranging from Ben Hope to Lakeland's Red Pike (one of my personal favourites) and onto Blakeney Spit and Ynys Enlli, many of them places shaped by human contact but places that now have an indefinable feeling of the wild about them. However, the book ends as it starts with the author in the Beech woodlands walking distance from his Cambridge home. In the first chapter he laments "the roar of the nearby road" and the "junk heaps.....brick rubble, water swollen plywood, rags of newspaper" he finds as he explores the area. The book ends, however, with Macfarlane seeing the woodland through fresh eyes. "Wildness was here, too, a short mile south of the town in which I lived. It was set about by roads and buildings, much of it was menaced, and some of it was dying. But at the moment the land seemed to ring with a wild light".
Britain is not Alaska, I am not Ray Mears, but Macfarlane is a man who through this book celebrates those moments where we can find ourselves removed from the humdrum of day to day life and feel as if we are in wild country. Not long ago I was on Loughrigg, equidistant from Grasmere and Keswick, the A591 running along Rydal Water below me, dusk was falling and I found myself in a boggy hollow next to a tiny tear shaped tarn. The stars started to show through the cloud, the wind gusted loudly above me pushing a Raven ahead of it and I could neither see, nor hear any sign of humanity and it felt wild to me....

All quotes are taken from the book itself

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

"Much has been written of travel, far less of the road"

Edward Thomas-The Icknield Way 1913

I have recently finished reading The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane. It is quite simply, a stunning book and one that should be on the bookshelf of every walker and outdoor enthusiast. In the book the author sets out to explore, "the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters." In addition to his exploration of the ancient landscapes of Britain he strays further afield looking at how pathways in Palestine are linked to a sense of a whole people's historical identity. He visits the mountains of Spain and the Himalayas, all the time linking the pathways on which he treads to their history and the history of the landscape around them and the people who have used it and called it home.
MacFarlane writes economically and beautifully, he brings vividly to live the sheer "joie de vivre" that simply putting one foot in front of another can awaken in us. He sleeps rough in wild landscapes, wakes (literally) with the larks and furnishes an obsession with great wanderers of the past including, most notably, the soldier poet, Edward Thomas. He tackles the Icknield Way, a route which claims to be Britain's oldest roadway and existed long before the Romans came to Britain, he risks the "Broomway", a perilous and deadly path fringed by quicksand and susceptible to the racing tides of the Essex coast and he tramps the Cairngorms en route to the funeral of his Grandfather, a man of mountainous country.
 In addition to the delightful company of MacFarlane himself, the reader is introduced to a cast of "wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers and devouts". As well as Thomas who used walking to try and counteract the fierce depressions that blighted his life, we are introduced to the sinister, dour Guga men (gannet hunters) of Ness, to Steve Dilworth a reclusive Shaman and artist of the Outer Hebrides and to Raja Shehadeh who has been walking the paths of Ramallah in Palestine over forty years of war and peace.
The book finishes with the author on the coast near Formby, a few miles from Liverpool. He is crossing the Formby silts where footprints of humans and animals made over 5000 years ago have been preserved in the mud and are periodically uncovered by the tides and the elements. The final chapter neatly ties all the threads of this fascinating book together as MacFarlane literally walks step for step with a man who died 3000 years before the birth of Christ. These landscapes we choose to walk in and explore our not ours, they are part of a vast unending history of journeys. Journeys taken for pleasure, out of necessity, in hope, in desperation, alone, with others, with a defined end and everlasting. We would do well to remember that and feel humbled by it.

All quotes are taken from the book itself.