Book review: The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. Penguin Books.

Yet another classic I have come late to, this part travelogue, part meditation on life is a classic from a master writer. The book celebrates the act of walking down old paths, tracks, holloways, drove roads, water paths,  across the British Isles, with detours in Ramallah and the Himalayas.

The book is verily an ode to walking. The author quotes Descartes: I walk therefore I am, and touches on the manifold pleasures of  those who  amble, ramble, stroll, wander, saunter. The word `saunter,` he tells us, is from the French sans terre, an abbreviation of  la sainte terre, meaning to the sacred place.

I cannot review a book where every second passage gleams with gold. Instead, let me quote Macfarlane himself.

In one passage, he says: We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear  with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places  — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them, are among the most important landscapes we possess.

Elsewhere, Macfarlane sings the praises of walking pilgrimages, telling us of walkers who use walking to make meaning for themselves, simply, elaborately, briefly, life-dominatingly, all of them true pilgrims.

When walking in the Ramallah region with a Palestinian friend, the author muses on the origin of the Arabic word sarha, to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, allowing them to wander and graze freely. It is of course, quite another matter that Palestinians are now denied the right to sarha in their own land.

Walkers also need to be noticers, he says, otherwise what is the pleasure to be obtained from the act of walking? Macfarlane waxes positively lyrical as when he describes one stunning night: the sky was framed by the black valley sides. There was a shooting star and then a satellite, winking across the darkness. A curd-yellow moon. Old land, high crags, silence, the moon, the fire, and a feeling of deep calm and connection.

Eerie experience

The author recounts the eerie experience he had at Chanctonbury Ring, one of the most haunted places in the Sussex Downs. At around 2 am, he started to hear high-pitched screams coming from  treetop height. First it was one voice, then a deeper voice joined in the screaming. Then the screams came towards him as he lay in his bedroll on the ground, stayed suspended over his head for a full fifteen minutes, and finally stopped, leaving even an old vet like him shaken.

Macfarlane quotes a line from a Spanish poem: There is no road, the road is made by walking, further buttressing the sentiment with another Spanish saying: to walk is to gather treasure.

And then,  this masterclass in walking: I prefer to take landscape as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable transitory phenomena that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.

One line resonated a lot with me: always take the weather with you everywhere you go.

If you are a walker, you need to read this book. If you are a muser, you need to read it. If you are an armchair traveller, you too need to read it.