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Landscape and the Human Heart Trilogy #2
The Wild Places
"An eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface."
Bill McKibben
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. A unique travelogue that will intrigue readers of natural history and adventure, The Wild Places solidifies Macfarlane's reputation as a young writer to watch.
Bill McKibben
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. A unique travelogue that will intrigue readers of natural history and adventure, The Wild Places solidifies Macfarlane's reputation as a young writer to watch.
340 pages, Paperback
First published September 3, 2007
566 people are currently reading
12604 people want to read
About the author
Robert Macfarlane
117 books4,401 followersRobert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.
Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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May 8, 2019Well this is one of those travel books with a double journey. On the surface Macfarlane travels across the, well dare I say the British Isles given the long established fact of an Irish independent state, , almost managing to flow sequentially from the hardest to the softest parts of these islands - meaning from granite to mudflats and salt marshes , though at the end he skips back to the moderately hard Peak District for reasons of his own.
At the same time there is an inner journey as Macfarlane conception of wildness develops. At first he plans to visit the wildest spots across these islands between Iceland and France, imagining finding some pristine landscapes not impacted upon by human activity at the fringes of these islands. Some of you may already be laughing at the innocence of this notion, and indeed after 126 pages he realises:
"Lying there on the drifted sand, under the white stars, I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys - inhuman, northern, remote - was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself. No such chaste land exists in Britain or Ireland, and no such myth of purity can hold. Thousands of years of human living and dying have destroyed the possibility of the pristine wild. Every islet and mountain top, every secret valley or woodland, has been visited, dwelled in, worked, or marked at some point in the past five millennia. The human and the wild cannot be partitioned" (p127).
This notion is challenged by Roger Deakin, who draws Macfarlene's attention to the micro-wild such as the rich environment of a hedgerow. For Deakin the wild, as in something unregulated by human activity, is close at hand, while for Macfarlene it is remoter and reaching it in itself is an adventure, perhaps even a pilgrimage. As the book progressed my feeling was that despite Macfarlene's words above human and wild remained exclusive and opposite terms, that they were separate rather than interwoven in a complete ecosystem. Although he writes critically that "we have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference" (p203) my feeling was reading that the book itself evidenced how hard such a heresy is to abandon. Ultimately for him "wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us" (p307), which for me is to ignore the issue of their intrinsic worth in favour of assessing them on the basis of their value to humanity - which is a hallmark surely of the heresy of aloofness and belief in difference that he earlier pointed out as problematic.
The wild, we might surmise, is as useful to us as the dairy cow, and therefore we ought to cherish it. Supporting this idea much of the book is taken up by testimonial about the restorative power of, to use Macfarlane's term, 'the wild' not just as a place to visit but even as something to hold as precious in the memory. And I am one of those people who does find nourishment from even the memory of certain places, ah there is a good irony in how we can't stand the world that we ourselves construct, Homo Faber can't even serve its own best interest, but the notion is troubling since it is based, I suspect, on an implicit ideology of difference: there is something different I can escape to, or maybe I'm over critical here.
Let me type that I shrug my shoulders and then I can move on to a digression which is that I suspect that my affinity with nature is the result of nurture, early inculcation via my mother's milk of one of the stories about my maternal grandfather's paternal grandfather who would collect firewood from a forest every day and so lived to a lean and sprightly old age. Still daily contact with the revitalising force of the natural world didn't prevent him from being a supporter of various far right political groups, perhaps it even encouraged him to think of the value of getting a place in the sun rather than being stuck in the shade of leafy trees. But enough digression.
In any case the idea of difference persists: "The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us" (p316) he writes. 'We' here are something separate from the 'wild' of which on page 127 we were inseparable, once we take a pair of draper's scissors to the fabric of the ecosystem we make a nonsense of the whole cloth. Leaving this to one side we have an idea here of the strength of this phenomena which is not human only a few pages on to be confronted with "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" (p321). Macfarlene's beloved phenomena is both incredibly strong, yet incredibly vulnerable, interwoven with us, yet completely distinct from us. This confusion of the inner journey makes a nice contrast with the logic of the surface journey from hard places to soft ones and provides the book with a curious vitality, by which I mean I'd snap awake reading it on my commute thinking - hang on, that's the opposite of what he said a few pages back. It is a picture of the complexity of the human mind - fully capable of holding a mess of contradictory notions within the confines of a single skull.
This is not though the surface reason for reading the book, instead that is provided by the pleasant nature writing, hawks and moors and hares and hares. The book reminded me of The Wild Rover with its enjoyment of the countryside and desire to experience night walking, although Macfarlene is less bothered about sleeping in the open and, like our old dead dog, he will strip off and swim in any pool of still or sea water that he comes across (at least that's the impression he gives). Certainly a deeply felt book, certainly nicely written and engaging, even if its central premise is an awkward one - really if a wild place is one without humans then we can never know them, and on this planet is there any point at which we are not interacting with everything else?
At the same time there is an inner journey as Macfarlane conception of wildness develops. At first he plans to visit the wildest spots across these islands between Iceland and France, imagining finding some pristine landscapes not impacted upon by human activity at the fringes of these islands. Some of you may already be laughing at the innocence of this notion, and indeed after 126 pages he realises:
"Lying there on the drifted sand, under the white stars, I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys - inhuman, northern, remote - was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself. No such chaste land exists in Britain or Ireland, and no such myth of purity can hold. Thousands of years of human living and dying have destroyed the possibility of the pristine wild. Every islet and mountain top, every secret valley or woodland, has been visited, dwelled in, worked, or marked at some point in the past five millennia. The human and the wild cannot be partitioned" (p127).
This notion is challenged by Roger Deakin, who draws Macfarlene's attention to the micro-wild such as the rich environment of a hedgerow. For Deakin the wild, as in something unregulated by human activity, is close at hand, while for Macfarlene it is remoter and reaching it in itself is an adventure, perhaps even a pilgrimage. As the book progressed my feeling was that despite Macfarlene's words above human and wild remained exclusive and opposite terms, that they were separate rather than interwoven in a complete ecosystem. Although he writes critically that "we have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference" (p203) my feeling was reading that the book itself evidenced how hard such a heresy is to abandon. Ultimately for him "wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us" (p307), which for me is to ignore the issue of their intrinsic worth in favour of assessing them on the basis of their value to humanity - which is a hallmark surely of the heresy of aloofness and belief in difference that he earlier pointed out as problematic.
The wild, we might surmise, is as useful to us as the dairy cow, and therefore we ought to cherish it. Supporting this idea much of the book is taken up by testimonial about the restorative power of, to use Macfarlane's term, 'the wild' not just as a place to visit but even as something to hold as precious in the memory. And I am one of those people who does find nourishment from even the memory of certain places, ah there is a good irony in how we can't stand the world that we ourselves construct, Homo Faber can't even serve its own best interest, but the notion is troubling since it is based, I suspect, on an implicit ideology of difference: there is something different I can escape to, or maybe I'm over critical here.
Let me type that I shrug my shoulders and then I can move on to a digression which is that I suspect that my affinity with nature is the result of nurture, early inculcation via my mother's milk of one of the stories about my maternal grandfather's paternal grandfather who would collect firewood from a forest every day and so lived to a lean and sprightly old age. Still daily contact with the revitalising force of the natural world didn't prevent him from being a supporter of various far right political groups, perhaps it even encouraged him to think of the value of getting a place in the sun rather than being stuck in the shade of leafy trees. But enough digression.
In any case the idea of difference persists: "The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us" (p316) he writes. 'We' here are something separate from the 'wild' of which on page 127 we were inseparable, once we take a pair of draper's scissors to the fabric of the ecosystem we make a nonsense of the whole cloth. Leaving this to one side we have an idea here of the strength of this phenomena which is not human only a few pages on to be confronted with "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" (p321). Macfarlene's beloved phenomena is both incredibly strong, yet incredibly vulnerable, interwoven with us, yet completely distinct from us. This confusion of the inner journey makes a nice contrast with the logic of the surface journey from hard places to soft ones and provides the book with a curious vitality, by which I mean I'd snap awake reading it on my commute thinking - hang on, that's the opposite of what he said a few pages back. It is a picture of the complexity of the human mind - fully capable of holding a mess of contradictory notions within the confines of a single skull.
This is not though the surface reason for reading the book, instead that is provided by the pleasant nature writing, hawks and moors and hares and hares. The book reminded me of The Wild Rover with its enjoyment of the countryside and desire to experience night walking, although Macfarlene is less bothered about sleeping in the open and, like our old dead dog, he will strip off and swim in any pool of still or sea water that he comes across (at least that's the impression he gives). Certainly a deeply felt book, certainly nicely written and engaging, even if its central premise is an awkward one - really if a wild place is one without humans then we can never know them, and on this planet is there any point at which we are not interacting with everything else?
August 12, 2015
This review originally appeared on my blog, Shoulda Coulda Woulda Books.
“When I woke in the corrie above Doo Lough that night, at some point in the small hours, the cloud had passed away, and the moon was pouring its light down on to the valley. I was thirsty, so I took my metal cup and walked to the side of the corrie and held the cup beneath the spill of one of the waterfalls. The water hit the tin and set it ringing like a bell. I drank and looked down over the dark valley. The shadows of the mountain on either side of the lough were cast over its floor in clear black shapes. The starlight fell upon the scene, old light from dead stars, and where it fell, the boulders and swells of the landscape cast dark moon-shadows, and I could see the night wind rippling over the grass of the valley, stirring into ghostly presence.”
-Chapter 9, “Grave”
There’s a process that every small human goes through. It starts when you’re a baby and open your eyes to see all the freaky beings above you and when you’re touched and realize what that is. From there, the work of discovering the world becomes the primary task of young childhood. That’s why we as teachers now know that tactile things and real experiences are the best way for children to learn. Children don’t think in the abstract for the most part, so it doesn’t make sense to teach them that way. Skipping over this experiential discovery to make them little adults, and give them symbols with no idea of their meaning (don’t ask them to add 2 + 2 when they don’t know what 2 really is), to make them look like little adults as fast as possible, is to take away something important and foundational that may never be reclaimed. Children will probably catch up eventually as to the meaning of the number 2, but they may never, in a real way, be able to understand how to face a problem and figure it out, rather than looking away until you’re forced not to. Just because you have all the feels welling up inside of you doesn’t mean that you know why or what to do with them.
I see the evidence of the symbolic, rather than experiential, understanding that people have of the world in a lot of national conversations, whether it is on the systemic nature of racism, trying to have a complex understanding of various Islamic societies, or, very notably, the climate change debate. There, there are just so many people who don’t want to look at something that’s hard to look at, and throwing facts at them, even evidence of the suffering of other beings, does absolutely nothing. It’s an intellectual brick wall that has thrown up its defensiveness and learned instinct to never ever be wrong in public so high that there’s no scaling it. (Yes, as I hear some of you saying, even when it is disingenuously supporting something for money- there’s nothing more angry or defensive or willing to deny it than someone who is in the wrong and knows it.)
This is why I think Robert MacFarlane’s writing, and in particular what he does with The Wild Places, is such a powerful thing to read. Because he doesn’t, despite all temptation, despite all reasons to do so, go for the facts-and-evidence-and-sanity-and-rage that we’ve seen from so many understandably desperate liberal pundits and leaders. Instead, he tries to slip underneath our childhood defenses in another way- with sheer beauty.
The Wild Places is, above everything, a catalogue. It is an attempt to create, as he tells us early on in the collection, a different kind of map, of the sort of “wild places” that are left in the British Isles. Every chapter focuses on a different land feature- island, valley, cape, moor, forest, holloway, storm-beach, summit, tor- and MacFarlane’s experience exploring it during one year, thus not only experiencing all the different topographical features on offer, but also all the different seasons and weathers and populations one might find there.
The book is, as others have mentioned, somewhat formulaic. But what a formula. He tends to open with a lovely set-piece of wherever he’s visiting now, woven through with poetic imagery and an enviable naturalist’s vocabulary that makes you long to look up every lovely word. He then moves to a diary-like description of everything he did in this location, interspersed with either a personal memory or a literary reflection of someone else who has walked here before. We’ll get an acknowledgement of environmental degradation or climate change, delivered in a mostly matter of fact fashion. And he’ll close it out by waxing poetic again, in a quiet sort of way, as if he’s waving goodbye to each place for the last time.
It’s a formula that works very well for what he’s trying to do here, which is to get people to experience what he experiences. It is an enthusiast’s work like any enthusiast’s work, but with a real purpose behind it. He wants to take us to the mountain top with him to let us know what it is like there. That is his best argument about why these places should be saved.
And he chooses absolutely gorgeous, wonder-filled, chill-inducing, amazing places to make this argument. He sleeps on an island of rock on a “storm-beach”. He spends a night on Enlli, an island formerly occupied by retreating monks of the middle ages and now only birds. He visits the Burrens, a layered grave yard of thousands of years of Irish dead. He walks holloways that still haven’t been cleared away in Essex and rappels himself into Coruisk, perhaps the largest “secret garden” of a valley to be found in the islands. Each place is gorgeous in its uniqueness and some, depending on your taste in wildness, are unforgettable. Rannoch Moor and the Black Wood that lie just to the east of it were places that spoke to my deep places of myth, story and memory.
He wants to make sure that we understand what we are losing when we lose these wild places. In lieu of being able to lead us on actual experiences, he tries to get us to imagine them into being as much as possible. And because we are eternally self-centered, he tries, like we all must do, to point out how wild places affect people in material ways (as he seems aware, pointing out their beauty, mystery and thought-changing capacities will not be enough).
His (oft-repeated, I must admit) major realizations that he comes to over the course of the year are lovely, and if a bit trite, are none the less full of truth. Wild places, he finds, are useful to us because they offer us a place to think and be differently, literally without the boundaries that divide us in the human created and maintained world. Wild places are, truly, probably not entirely “wild”, but filled with a history that is fascinating and layered and heartbreaking if we only knew how to look for it (and the heartbreak is just as much human as animal- just wait for his chapters on the Scottish Clearances and the Famine cottages). Wild places remind us of the truly communal nature of the world- touching things and feeling the reality of them is important for us to stay connected to our role as a member of not only the human race, but our planet as a whole. And, of course, “wild” places can be found everywhere, as he eventually figures out for himself- just look out your front door. Some of these truths, out of context, are precious. In context, they seem just the inevitable result of his journey:
“The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialization. The almost infinite connectivity of technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world- its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits- as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of a distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.”
It is also one of the few positive examples I’ve seen of what can be accomplished by harnessing the power of national myth and national imagination to your own purposes. We all know the pastoral national self-image of English identity, no? It’s in all our fairy tale books (especially the sanitized ones): friendly meadows and streams where flocks of cows and sheep grow strong, and butterflies, cowslips and grasshoppers delight children in an eternal summer afternoon of Beatrix Potter characters. MacFarlane, scholar of the Romantic literature that helped to solidify this national self-understanding, does a great job turning this to his own purposes. Whenever he can make a connection to it, he reminds readers of all the connection’s Britain’s great writers and artists have had to the woods- Coleridge, Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, scientists and passionate little-knowns are all deputized to the task. He brings in WWI, and the conscious falling-in-love people did with this idea of traditional England after their time in the trenches. He goes to emotionally resonant places like the tor, where Arthur may rise again, to places of childish mystery like the holloways of the fairies and the deepwood. He evokes the Wild Hunt, and shows the marks of history all over the landscape, Scottish, Irish and Lake District. (The fact of its use is actually vaguely sinister, which I would not have thought of before I read about Helen MacDonald grappling with that fact in H is for Hawk: that is, that the nature that she loved was so frequently co-opted by the worst nationalists and that she might be taken to support them. MacFarlane does not reckon with this, and in his soft-pedaled version, perhaps he does not need to, but it is worth mentioning all the same.)
There are some flaws, however, as admirable I find it in its goals and its chosen style of execution, however many lovely images I re-read or felt the urge to underline. As I mentioned, it is rather formulaic, which can sometimes get tiresome when you want the formula to lead to the next thing. He also becomes repetitive- the same insights he comes to at the end of one chapter is repeated several times over (however lovely it is), rather than that insight leading him to a new insight and furthering his thought. In addition, while I admired for the most part that he didn’t define every naturalists’ term that he used for us, I think that a glossary in the back of the book would have helped readers who just didn’t have his knowledge of rocks and trees and birds and landforms. There were some pages whose meaning was entirely lost to me because the words themselves were lost to me (something, by the way, it seems that he also realized, given his latest book, Landmarks). And finally, the parts in each chapter where he recounts his own actual journey could be rather prosaic- I did fall asleep a few times while reading this.
However, I believe that if it is read in the proper fashion (which to me means reading one or two essays a day, rather than trying to push oneself through it like I did), a lot of these flaws are likely to bother you much less. I think this would make excellent before-bed reading, commuting reading, read-outside-in-a-hammock reading, or reading for a family vacation when you’re never sure how much time you’ll have to read. It is an ideal book to retreat into for an hour and then put down again and feel refreshed and restored. Beauty can be enough to change us- MacFarlane is the proof.
“When I woke in the corrie above Doo Lough that night, at some point in the small hours, the cloud had passed away, and the moon was pouring its light down on to the valley. I was thirsty, so I took my metal cup and walked to the side of the corrie and held the cup beneath the spill of one of the waterfalls. The water hit the tin and set it ringing like a bell. I drank and looked down over the dark valley. The shadows of the mountain on either side of the lough were cast over its floor in clear black shapes. The starlight fell upon the scene, old light from dead stars, and where it fell, the boulders and swells of the landscape cast dark moon-shadows, and I could see the night wind rippling over the grass of the valley, stirring into ghostly presence.”
-Chapter 9, “Grave”
There’s a process that every small human goes through. It starts when you’re a baby and open your eyes to see all the freaky beings above you and when you’re touched and realize what that is. From there, the work of discovering the world becomes the primary task of young childhood. That’s why we as teachers now know that tactile things and real experiences are the best way for children to learn. Children don’t think in the abstract for the most part, so it doesn’t make sense to teach them that way. Skipping over this experiential discovery to make them little adults, and give them symbols with no idea of their meaning (don’t ask them to add 2 + 2 when they don’t know what 2 really is), to make them look like little adults as fast as possible, is to take away something important and foundational that may never be reclaimed. Children will probably catch up eventually as to the meaning of the number 2, but they may never, in a real way, be able to understand how to face a problem and figure it out, rather than looking away until you’re forced not to. Just because you have all the feels welling up inside of you doesn’t mean that you know why or what to do with them.
I see the evidence of the symbolic, rather than experiential, understanding that people have of the world in a lot of national conversations, whether it is on the systemic nature of racism, trying to have a complex understanding of various Islamic societies, or, very notably, the climate change debate. There, there are just so many people who don’t want to look at something that’s hard to look at, and throwing facts at them, even evidence of the suffering of other beings, does absolutely nothing. It’s an intellectual brick wall that has thrown up its defensiveness and learned instinct to never ever be wrong in public so high that there’s no scaling it. (Yes, as I hear some of you saying, even when it is disingenuously supporting something for money- there’s nothing more angry or defensive or willing to deny it than someone who is in the wrong and knows it.)
This is why I think Robert MacFarlane’s writing, and in particular what he does with The Wild Places, is such a powerful thing to read. Because he doesn’t, despite all temptation, despite all reasons to do so, go for the facts-and-evidence-and-sanity-and-rage that we’ve seen from so many understandably desperate liberal pundits and leaders. Instead, he tries to slip underneath our childhood defenses in another way- with sheer beauty.
The Wild Places is, above everything, a catalogue. It is an attempt to create, as he tells us early on in the collection, a different kind of map, of the sort of “wild places” that are left in the British Isles. Every chapter focuses on a different land feature- island, valley, cape, moor, forest, holloway, storm-beach, summit, tor- and MacFarlane’s experience exploring it during one year, thus not only experiencing all the different topographical features on offer, but also all the different seasons and weathers and populations one might find there.
The book is, as others have mentioned, somewhat formulaic. But what a formula. He tends to open with a lovely set-piece of wherever he’s visiting now, woven through with poetic imagery and an enviable naturalist’s vocabulary that makes you long to look up every lovely word. He then moves to a diary-like description of everything he did in this location, interspersed with either a personal memory or a literary reflection of someone else who has walked here before. We’ll get an acknowledgement of environmental degradation or climate change, delivered in a mostly matter of fact fashion. And he’ll close it out by waxing poetic again, in a quiet sort of way, as if he’s waving goodbye to each place for the last time.
It’s a formula that works very well for what he’s trying to do here, which is to get people to experience what he experiences. It is an enthusiast’s work like any enthusiast’s work, but with a real purpose behind it. He wants to take us to the mountain top with him to let us know what it is like there. That is his best argument about why these places should be saved.
And he chooses absolutely gorgeous, wonder-filled, chill-inducing, amazing places to make this argument. He sleeps on an island of rock on a “storm-beach”. He spends a night on Enlli, an island formerly occupied by retreating monks of the middle ages and now only birds. He visits the Burrens, a layered grave yard of thousands of years of Irish dead. He walks holloways that still haven’t been cleared away in Essex and rappels himself into Coruisk, perhaps the largest “secret garden” of a valley to be found in the islands. Each place is gorgeous in its uniqueness and some, depending on your taste in wildness, are unforgettable. Rannoch Moor and the Black Wood that lie just to the east of it were places that spoke to my deep places of myth, story and memory.
He wants to make sure that we understand what we are losing when we lose these wild places. In lieu of being able to lead us on actual experiences, he tries to get us to imagine them into being as much as possible. And because we are eternally self-centered, he tries, like we all must do, to point out how wild places affect people in material ways (as he seems aware, pointing out their beauty, mystery and thought-changing capacities will not be enough).
His (oft-repeated, I must admit) major realizations that he comes to over the course of the year are lovely, and if a bit trite, are none the less full of truth. Wild places, he finds, are useful to us because they offer us a place to think and be differently, literally without the boundaries that divide us in the human created and maintained world. Wild places are, truly, probably not entirely “wild”, but filled with a history that is fascinating and layered and heartbreaking if we only knew how to look for it (and the heartbreak is just as much human as animal- just wait for his chapters on the Scottish Clearances and the Famine cottages). Wild places remind us of the truly communal nature of the world- touching things and feeling the reality of them is important for us to stay connected to our role as a member of not only the human race, but our planet as a whole. And, of course, “wild” places can be found everywhere, as he eventually figures out for himself- just look out your front door. Some of these truths, out of context, are precious. In context, they seem just the inevitable result of his journey:
“The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialization. The almost infinite connectivity of technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world- its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits- as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of a distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.”
It is also one of the few positive examples I’ve seen of what can be accomplished by harnessing the power of national myth and national imagination to your own purposes. We all know the pastoral national self-image of English identity, no? It’s in all our fairy tale books (especially the sanitized ones): friendly meadows and streams where flocks of cows and sheep grow strong, and butterflies, cowslips and grasshoppers delight children in an eternal summer afternoon of Beatrix Potter characters. MacFarlane, scholar of the Romantic literature that helped to solidify this national self-understanding, does a great job turning this to his own purposes. Whenever he can make a connection to it, he reminds readers of all the connection’s Britain’s great writers and artists have had to the woods- Coleridge, Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, scientists and passionate little-knowns are all deputized to the task. He brings in WWI, and the conscious falling-in-love people did with this idea of traditional England after their time in the trenches. He goes to emotionally resonant places like the tor, where Arthur may rise again, to places of childish mystery like the holloways of the fairies and the deepwood. He evokes the Wild Hunt, and shows the marks of history all over the landscape, Scottish, Irish and Lake District. (The fact of its use is actually vaguely sinister, which I would not have thought of before I read about Helen MacDonald grappling with that fact in H is for Hawk: that is, that the nature that she loved was so frequently co-opted by the worst nationalists and that she might be taken to support them. MacFarlane does not reckon with this, and in his soft-pedaled version, perhaps he does not need to, but it is worth mentioning all the same.)
There are some flaws, however, as admirable I find it in its goals and its chosen style of execution, however many lovely images I re-read or felt the urge to underline. As I mentioned, it is rather formulaic, which can sometimes get tiresome when you want the formula to lead to the next thing. He also becomes repetitive- the same insights he comes to at the end of one chapter is repeated several times over (however lovely it is), rather than that insight leading him to a new insight and furthering his thought. In addition, while I admired for the most part that he didn’t define every naturalists’ term that he used for us, I think that a glossary in the back of the book would have helped readers who just didn’t have his knowledge of rocks and trees and birds and landforms. There were some pages whose meaning was entirely lost to me because the words themselves were lost to me (something, by the way, it seems that he also realized, given his latest book, Landmarks). And finally, the parts in each chapter where he recounts his own actual journey could be rather prosaic- I did fall asleep a few times while reading this.
However, I believe that if it is read in the proper fashion (which to me means reading one or two essays a day, rather than trying to push oneself through it like I did), a lot of these flaws are likely to bother you much less. I think this would make excellent before-bed reading, commuting reading, read-outside-in-a-hammock reading, or reading for a family vacation when you’re never sure how much time you’ll have to read. It is an ideal book to retreat into for an hour and then put down again and feel refreshed and restored. Beauty can be enough to change us- MacFarlane is the proof.
August 12, 2012
Simply lovely. A beautiful, lyrical meditation on wildness and whether or not wild places still exist in the U.K. The themes that flow through MacFarlane’s writing – friendship, life, death, the past, present and future of our species and our relationship with our surroundings – feel like a layered extension of the landscapes he observes so keenly. They ebb and flow through the chapters as much (and in much the same way) as the weather, seasons, water, and migrating birds he describes. He references this in the closing chapter (p. 314):
A few other notes:
“My journeys had revealed to me new logics of connection...A webbing of story and memory joined up my places, as well as other more material affinities. The connections made by all of these forces – rocks, creatures, weathers, people – had laid new patterns upon the country, as though it had been swilled in a developing fluid, and unexpected images had emerged, ghostly figures showing through the mesh of roads and cities.”His growing realization that wildness is to be found even in the smallest of spaces is a powerful one, but I wish he’d acknowledged that there is a big difference between the wild to be found in a hedgerow vs. the solitude of a vast, empty moor. However much we can and ought to heighten our appreciation for the former, humans need the latter.
A few other notes:
-As with other travel books, my enjoyment was heightened by following his travels via Google Earth.Definitely going to read his other volumes, although I might save them for a wintry night later this year.
- Macfarlane is himself a well-read fan of the travel/nature writing genre and the book includes a carefully selected reading list - I've already added several of his suggestions to my to-read shelf.
February 8, 2018
My life has been enriched by this book - which sounds fairly pretentious, I know, but I don't care. Sharing the author's journeys to the Wild Places of Britain and Ireland has increased my awareness and appreciation of the world I inhabit. And the untimely death of his friend adds a moving and very human dimension to what is already a remarkable book.
January 5, 2020
In The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane sets out to find if there are any such environments left within the British Isles. The book begins contemplatively, with the author journeying to one of his favourite local places, a beech wood outside the city of Cambridge where he lives, climbing a tree as is his wont, so he can sit and observe, and be part of, this sylvan idyll.
This sets the tone wonderfully. From the very first sentence, you realise that you are in for a special experience; the quality of MacFarlane’s prose is quietly spectacular, largely understated but with the rhythms of good poetry and this, combined with his eye for detail and a mind that connects the landscape and the animals and our inhabitation along with more personal experiences, make the book extraordinary.
Over fifteen chapters MacFarlane travels across Britain, and to Ireland, to experience the places he considers most “wild” and natural, initially using as a guide the travels of the legendary Irish King Sweeney, who was made to wander the wild places as a beast following an act of betrayal.
From the island of Ynys Enlii, off the Lleyn Peninsula, where Wales reaches it most Western point toward Ireland, on to Scotland - to Coriusk on Skye, Rannoch Moor, Coille Dubh ( The Black Wood ), Strathnaver and Ben Klibreck, Cape Wrath and Ben Hope before crossing the Irish Sea to the desolation of the Burren. MacFarlane finds even more poetry in these places than their evocative names suggest - along with the rest of his journey, to the high ridges of the Lakeland fells, the Kentish Holloways, the storm-lashed beaches of Norfolk, Essex saltmarshes and, finally, my own back yard, the moors above Hope Valley in the High Peak. His writing conjures the landscape like nobody I’ve read, the individual feel and sense and rhythm of each place, drawing the reader to it - even when, as in attempting to spend the night on the frozen Ben Hope in Northern Scotland, for the first time he feels how truly hostile a place can be and is genuinely afraid.
Each section of travelogue is also woven through with skeins of history - both of the regions, and more personal history. This becomes more pointed when MacFarlane’s friend Roger, with whom he has discussed many of his trips, have shared ideas and thoughts like the oldest of friends, who has accompanied him on several excursions, falls suddenly ill.
The final trip to the Peak District brings the book full circle, as he is shown where to find snow hares by John, who had piloted the boat out to Ynys Enlii, and then a final coda where MacFarlane returns once more to the beech wood. He may have found that there is, perhaps, no true wilderness in the British Isles, in that there is no land that has not been shaped by humanity and our works, but that the wild is still there to be appreciated and respected, should we wish to look for it, that we need to protect it for our own health and benefit, but it the wild places will be there long after we have gone.
5/5, and an instant addition to the Favourites shelf
This sets the tone wonderfully. From the very first sentence, you realise that you are in for a special experience; the quality of MacFarlane’s prose is quietly spectacular, largely understated but with the rhythms of good poetry and this, combined with his eye for detail and a mind that connects the landscape and the animals and our inhabitation along with more personal experiences, make the book extraordinary.
Over fifteen chapters MacFarlane travels across Britain, and to Ireland, to experience the places he considers most “wild” and natural, initially using as a guide the travels of the legendary Irish King Sweeney, who was made to wander the wild places as a beast following an act of betrayal.
From the island of Ynys Enlii, off the Lleyn Peninsula, where Wales reaches it most Western point toward Ireland, on to Scotland - to Coriusk on Skye, Rannoch Moor, Coille Dubh ( The Black Wood ), Strathnaver and Ben Klibreck, Cape Wrath and Ben Hope before crossing the Irish Sea to the desolation of the Burren. MacFarlane finds even more poetry in these places than their evocative names suggest - along with the rest of his journey, to the high ridges of the Lakeland fells, the Kentish Holloways, the storm-lashed beaches of Norfolk, Essex saltmarshes and, finally, my own back yard, the moors above Hope Valley in the High Peak. His writing conjures the landscape like nobody I’ve read, the individual feel and sense and rhythm of each place, drawing the reader to it - even when, as in attempting to spend the night on the frozen Ben Hope in Northern Scotland, for the first time he feels how truly hostile a place can be and is genuinely afraid.
Each section of travelogue is also woven through with skeins of history - both of the regions, and more personal history. This becomes more pointed when MacFarlane’s friend Roger, with whom he has discussed many of his trips, have shared ideas and thoughts like the oldest of friends, who has accompanied him on several excursions, falls suddenly ill.
The final trip to the Peak District brings the book full circle, as he is shown where to find snow hares by John, who had piloted the boat out to Ynys Enlii, and then a final coda where MacFarlane returns once more to the beech wood. He may have found that there is, perhaps, no true wilderness in the British Isles, in that there is no land that has not been shaped by humanity and our works, but that the wild is still there to be appreciated and respected, should we wish to look for it, that we need to protect it for our own health and benefit, but it the wild places will be there long after we have gone.
5/5, and an instant addition to the Favourites shelf
August 1, 2019
In seinem zweiten Buch erzählt der preisgekrönte britische Sachbuchautor Robert Macfarlane von seinen Reisen in die letzten echten Wildernisse Großbritanniens und Irlands. Dabei durchläuft er sämtliche Landschaftsformen Großbritanniens, nach denen das Buch auch in Kapitel unterteilt ist, etwa Buchenwald, Moor, Flussmündung, Gipfel oder Salzmarsch. Erwartungsgemäß sind die meisten dieser Orte in Schottland und Nordengland zu finden, doch auch der Süden ist nicht frei von Orten, an denen sich die Natur frei entfalten kann, auch wenn sie teilweise nicht sehr weitläufig sind: Schon eine Hecke in einem in Ruhe gelassenen Waldstück kann eine Wildnis sein.
Robert Macfarlane ist tatsächlich ein echter Naturbursche, ich muss gestehen, dass ich selbst, die ich mich als Naturfreundin bezeichne, niemals so nahe an der Natur sein könnte wie er. Zu jeder Jahreszeit springt er zum Schwimmen ins Wasser, wo immer es welches gibt. Er übernachtet im Freien, auch im Regen, errichtet sich ein Biwak an vermeintlich unwirtlichen Stellen, wenn sie nur ein wenig Schutz bieten. Daran musste ich gestern denken, als ich eine Wanderung entlang beeindruckender Felsen im Kirkeler Wald machte – die Felsüberhänge dort wären für Macfarlane wahrscheinlich perfekte Biwakplätze, während es mich bei der Vorstellung grauste – mit allzu viel Schmutz und Insekten möchte ich dann doch keinen direkten Kontakt. Das zeigt mir, wie recht Macfarlane hat, wir haben unsere Verbindung zur Natur größtenteils verloren.
„We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.“ (Seite 203)
Auch wenn die Verbindung zur Natur bei Macfarlane sicher sehr eng ist, macht auch er negative Erfahrungen, so fühlt er sich in der auf einem Berggipfel verbrachten Nacht unwillkommen.
Eine Rolle spielt in „The Wild Places“ auch die Freundschaft mit Roger Deakin, der ebenfalls ein auf die Natur spezialisierter Autor war und leider noch während Macfarlanes Reisen für das Buch verstarb, das Buch ist ihm gewidmet.
Was Macfarlanes Buch zu einem besonderen unter den Naturbüchern macht, ist die Kraft seiner Sprache, die eine magische Faszination auf die Leserin ausübt, Sätze wie „I could feel a silence that reached backwards to the Ice Age.“ (Seite 60) etwa oder „We stood blinking, wringing the light from our eyes.“ (Seite 233)
Diese Sprache in Verbindung mit faszinierenden Naturerlebnissen macht das Buch so lesenswert und weckte in mir den Wunsch, auch alle anderen Bücher von Robert Macfarlane zu lesen.
Und besonders kommt die Sprache zur Geltung, wenn es darum geht, dass der Mensch die Natur um seiner selbst willen schützen muss, wir sind es schließlich, die von der Natur abhängig sind.
„The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency. The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas. The sand will drift into our business parks, as it drifted into the brochs of the Iron Age. Our roads will lapse into the land.“ (Seite 317)
Robert Macfarlane ist tatsächlich ein echter Naturbursche, ich muss gestehen, dass ich selbst, die ich mich als Naturfreundin bezeichne, niemals so nahe an der Natur sein könnte wie er. Zu jeder Jahreszeit springt er zum Schwimmen ins Wasser, wo immer es welches gibt. Er übernachtet im Freien, auch im Regen, errichtet sich ein Biwak an vermeintlich unwirtlichen Stellen, wenn sie nur ein wenig Schutz bieten. Daran musste ich gestern denken, als ich eine Wanderung entlang beeindruckender Felsen im Kirkeler Wald machte – die Felsüberhänge dort wären für Macfarlane wahrscheinlich perfekte Biwakplätze, während es mich bei der Vorstellung grauste – mit allzu viel Schmutz und Insekten möchte ich dann doch keinen direkten Kontakt. Das zeigt mir, wie recht Macfarlane hat, wir haben unsere Verbindung zur Natur größtenteils verloren.
„We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.“ (Seite 203)
Auch wenn die Verbindung zur Natur bei Macfarlane sicher sehr eng ist, macht auch er negative Erfahrungen, so fühlt er sich in der auf einem Berggipfel verbrachten Nacht unwillkommen.
Eine Rolle spielt in „The Wild Places“ auch die Freundschaft mit Roger Deakin, der ebenfalls ein auf die Natur spezialisierter Autor war und leider noch während Macfarlanes Reisen für das Buch verstarb, das Buch ist ihm gewidmet.
Was Macfarlanes Buch zu einem besonderen unter den Naturbüchern macht, ist die Kraft seiner Sprache, die eine magische Faszination auf die Leserin ausübt, Sätze wie „I could feel a silence that reached backwards to the Ice Age.“ (Seite 60) etwa oder „We stood blinking, wringing the light from our eyes.“ (Seite 233)
Diese Sprache in Verbindung mit faszinierenden Naturerlebnissen macht das Buch so lesenswert und weckte in mir den Wunsch, auch alle anderen Bücher von Robert Macfarlane zu lesen.
Und besonders kommt die Sprache zur Geltung, wenn es darum geht, dass der Mensch die Natur um seiner selbst willen schützen muss, wir sind es schließlich, die von der Natur abhängig sind.
„The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency. The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas. The sand will drift into our business parks, as it drifted into the brochs of the Iron Age. Our roads will lapse into the land.“ (Seite 317)
January 5, 2015
I read that this is a classic, and I know why now. I was gratified to see it listed as a travel book, also, because it is. I've never wanted to travel to Britain as much as I do now. Macfarlane goes to natural places that are astounding. His writing is beautiful.
It took me longer than expected to read this, because I spent as much time in Google Earth as in the book. And that is my suggestion: a companion volume or new edition with photos and maps, with distances. I was trolling youtube, also, and found some marvelous videos of where Macfarlane visited.
It took me longer than expected to read this, because I spent as much time in Google Earth as in the book. And that is my suggestion: a companion volume or new edition with photos and maps, with distances. I was trolling youtube, also, and found some marvelous videos of where Macfarlane visited.
May 19, 2020
I expected to read this in bits and pieces over a period of months but instead, I enjoyed it so much that I read it straight through, with the occasional stop for wikipedia look-ups of places and vocabulary.
This book is classified nature/travel. It is Macfarlane's story of his search through the British Isles for "wild places", where nature is not disturbed or influenced by man. He doubts he will find any so his search starts on the tops of Highland mountains and on the remote islands of the coast. But then, he comes to realize (partially from his friendship with nature writer, Roger Deakin) that wildness still exists in micro bits in hedgerows, holloways, forest remnants and salt marshes of the more populated areas, too.
He brings so many stories into the book -- from fellow literary folks, from scientists & naturalists, artists and poets. Book is really more about the landscape than about nature & man's mark on the landscape is everywhere, even in remote places where the Highland clearances and Irish potato famines have left the land almost barren of people in modern times. He calls it "wildness as it is lived with humans".
I envy him the tromping around, the nights spent outside (although I can't imagine sleeping outside, without even a tent, in sub-freezing winds and rains), the views of moon and stars.
The book has a charming, whimsically drawn map but I really needed something more practical, that I could more easily follow his trips. I have spent much of my reading life in the British Isles but still not familiar with its geography and need more practical help with place names. A few months ago I read Paul Theroux's A Kingdom by the Sea with a British atlas in my lap so that had helped get a few places in my head already.
I now want to read more by Macfarlane and something by his good friend, Roger Deakin. And I realize that I've never read John Muir on the American landscape. I can even see re-reading this book again, just to savor his descriptions of the trees, birds, and history of the land. Lovely book.
This book is classified nature/travel. It is Macfarlane's story of his search through the British Isles for "wild places", where nature is not disturbed or influenced by man. He doubts he will find any so his search starts on the tops of Highland mountains and on the remote islands of the coast. But then, he comes to realize (partially from his friendship with nature writer, Roger Deakin) that wildness still exists in micro bits in hedgerows, holloways, forest remnants and salt marshes of the more populated areas, too.
He brings so many stories into the book -- from fellow literary folks, from scientists & naturalists, artists and poets. Book is really more about the landscape than about nature & man's mark on the landscape is everywhere, even in remote places where the Highland clearances and Irish potato famines have left the land almost barren of people in modern times. He calls it "wildness as it is lived with humans".
I envy him the tromping around, the nights spent outside (although I can't imagine sleeping outside, without even a tent, in sub-freezing winds and rains), the views of moon and stars.
The book has a charming, whimsically drawn map but I really needed something more practical, that I could more easily follow his trips. I have spent much of my reading life in the British Isles but still not familiar with its geography and need more practical help with place names. A few months ago I read Paul Theroux's A Kingdom by the Sea with a British atlas in my lap so that had helped get a few places in my head already.
I now want to read more by Macfarlane and something by his good friend, Roger Deakin. And I realize that I've never read John Muir on the American landscape. I can even see re-reading this book again, just to savor his descriptions of the trees, birds, and history of the land. Lovely book.
January 18, 2015
I wasn't sure what to expect from this book - I'm not normally a big fan of nature books or TV programmes - more my husband's area of interest. In fact I had bought this book for him to read, but was intrigued by it and started reading it. Then I was gripped and didn't want to put it down!
It has made me think a lot about how we live our lives - often too busy to notice the world around us - always in the car rushing from place to place with no time just to sit and look, listen and absorb what we see. But when we do have time, it is always a pleasure - for example noticing a hawk hovering over a field.
The book begins with MacFarlane having a particular idea about what wild places should be - vast open spaces, snow-covered mountains, moorlands, unpopulated islands etc. Gradually his ideas are modified through conversations and trips with various friends and he comes to see that wild places can be found anywhere - in towns, cities and many small spaces - a buddleia growing out of a wall, moss growing in a pavement crack, observing animals, birds in flight. All things, in fact, that produce a sense of awe and wonder at our world.
I found it a fascinating book, both on a level of personal discovery, realising the true nature of what is a wild place, and in opening the readers' minds to what exists within our own island(s). It has made me want to get out and discover more about my own part of the country.
It has made me think a lot about how we live our lives - often too busy to notice the world around us - always in the car rushing from place to place with no time just to sit and look, listen and absorb what we see. But when we do have time, it is always a pleasure - for example noticing a hawk hovering over a field.
The book begins with MacFarlane having a particular idea about what wild places should be - vast open spaces, snow-covered mountains, moorlands, unpopulated islands etc. Gradually his ideas are modified through conversations and trips with various friends and he comes to see that wild places can be found anywhere - in towns, cities and many small spaces - a buddleia growing out of a wall, moss growing in a pavement crack, observing animals, birds in flight. All things, in fact, that produce a sense of awe and wonder at our world.
I found it a fascinating book, both on a level of personal discovery, realising the true nature of what is a wild place, and in opening the readers' minds to what exists within our own island(s). It has made me want to get out and discover more about my own part of the country.
July 29, 2022
Will review shortly
Want to read
November 12, 2018Lettura per il tema del mese di novembre 2018: il viaggio.
"Ero solo uscito a fare due passi, ma alla fine decisi di restare fuori fino al tramonto, perché uscire, come avevo scoperto, voleva dire entrare." (John Muir)
"Ero solo uscito a fare due passi, ma alla fine decisi di restare fuori fino al tramonto, perché uscire, come avevo scoperto, voleva dire entrare." (John Muir)
September 23, 2020
There is a great review of this book by Kathleen Jamie entitled 'The Lone Enraptured Male' and for the most part I completely agree with this review and it's handle.
"Wild is a word like ‘soul’. Such a thing may not exist, but we want it, and we know what we mean when we talk about it." she writes ....so I guess that's it, that the concept of wild is perhaps a bit fluid and maybe that is why I was hugely disappointed by this book.
I loved some of the beautiful prose in this book but essentially it is a privileged male's musings whilst he sleeps outside in a bivvy. All fine, as I said some lovely writing and some interesting information - but for me, this is categorically not a book about Wild Places, let alone a book that even attempts to answer the question on the back of the book 'are there any wild places left in Britain and Ireland?'
He basically goes on to have a revelation that the 'wild' for him isn't just far flung barren places but also the fields and meadows of England....
Nope sorry not for me. Intensely farmed agricultural land is NOT wild. Perhaps in the same way my idea of the wild seems rather quaint to those who climb Everest or take 2 day hikes across Yosemite.
I also found it interesting reading this book in the context of today whereby there is the question of 'wildness' as an invention of colonialism ...what is wild to some is not wild to Gaelic crofters, Native Americans, aboriginal or indigenous peoples.
I had a few other issues with this book too...
Nothing is worse than a book that just quotes from or writes about OTHER BOOKS that the author has read. There was alot of this.
As Jamie writes:
"It’s a book about books: as much about the literature and reception of wild places as about the places themselves. To create texture and interest and avoid a constant look-at-me-swimming, it is full of digressions, explorations and asides which hugely enrich its texture" ...although I don't know if they DO enrich its texture to be honest
For me whole chapters went off on weird tangents and I am so sick of the same tid bits in every book I read about Scotland; Highland Clearances, Orwell on Jura....yawn... It's like a checklist sometimes. There is more to Scotland than this. One of the best bits of the book is where McFarlane meets and goes fishing with a local. Now thiss enriches the books texture.
Having said all this, there are some sections I found truly interesting (chapters on the Holloway and Sand Dunes for instance as I know little of them) and it is a fairly enjoyable book. The author's friendship with Roger Deakin is told very movingly.
But overall this totally missed the mark for me, it's not about the wild. I would have enjoyed it much more if it had been a small pamphlet about MacFarlane's experiences - even if parts are a bit boy scouts.
"Wild is a word like ‘soul’. Such a thing may not exist, but we want it, and we know what we mean when we talk about it." she writes ....so I guess that's it, that the concept of wild is perhaps a bit fluid and maybe that is why I was hugely disappointed by this book.
I loved some of the beautiful prose in this book but essentially it is a privileged male's musings whilst he sleeps outside in a bivvy. All fine, as I said some lovely writing and some interesting information - but for me, this is categorically not a book about Wild Places, let alone a book that even attempts to answer the question on the back of the book 'are there any wild places left in Britain and Ireland?'
He basically goes on to have a revelation that the 'wild' for him isn't just far flung barren places but also the fields and meadows of England....
Nope sorry not for me. Intensely farmed agricultural land is NOT wild. Perhaps in the same way my idea of the wild seems rather quaint to those who climb Everest or take 2 day hikes across Yosemite.
I also found it interesting reading this book in the context of today whereby there is the question of 'wildness' as an invention of colonialism ...what is wild to some is not wild to Gaelic crofters, Native Americans, aboriginal or indigenous peoples.
I had a few other issues with this book too...
Nothing is worse than a book that just quotes from or writes about OTHER BOOKS that the author has read. There was alot of this.
As Jamie writes:
"It’s a book about books: as much about the literature and reception of wild places as about the places themselves. To create texture and interest and avoid a constant look-at-me-swimming, it is full of digressions, explorations and asides which hugely enrich its texture" ...although I don't know if they DO enrich its texture to be honest
For me whole chapters went off on weird tangents and I am so sick of the same tid bits in every book I read about Scotland; Highland Clearances, Orwell on Jura....yawn... It's like a checklist sometimes. There is more to Scotland than this. One of the best bits of the book is where McFarlane meets and goes fishing with a local. Now thiss enriches the books texture.
Having said all this, there are some sections I found truly interesting (chapters on the Holloway and Sand Dunes for instance as I know little of them) and it is a fairly enjoyable book. The author's friendship with Roger Deakin is told very movingly.
But overall this totally missed the mark for me, it's not about the wild. I would have enjoyed it much more if it had been a small pamphlet about MacFarlane's experiences - even if parts are a bit boy scouts.
June 17, 2019
Fascinating stuff. Not only a paen to nature's wild places in the UK, but also including historical context that shaped the landscape such as the Clearances in Scotland and the Potato Famine in Ireland.
He's a bit bonkers though, deciding not only to scale a peak in northern Scotland in December but also to camp out for the night in just a sleeping bag.
He's a bit bonkers though, deciding not only to scale a peak in northern Scotland in December but also to camp out for the night in just a sleeping bag.
August 1, 2008
Kick-ass prose. Thoreausian perspective with Brit speak and a fair dose of eccentricity. Fueling my fire for roaming the wild places.
September 16, 2025
Picked up the book in hopes of satiating my longing for some of the natural beauty of the UK during my last few months in The Hague. Ended up reading most of it in Amman, where wilderness felt even further away. Macfarlane took me to these wild places up and down the country, scratching my itch and allowing me to reflect on my own relationship with the natural world. But ultimately by the end of the book my understanding of 'the wild' had shifted. I feel less of an urgent need to seek out vast and raw wild landscapes (which he himself admits can be annihilating and unaccommodating) and to instead look closer for the micro-wild world. His commentary on nature reclaiming the world from humans, superseding any form of human existence was strangely comforting. It made me think of home a lot, and my family, and I felt grateful for the upbringing which raised me so close to nature's forces, teaching me to see it as exciting and enabling instead of scary and inhibiting.
January 16, 2025
A poetic walk with Macfarlane through the remote areas of the United Kingdom meeting a range of obsessives. Obsessed with wild swimming, bird watching, sand scientists you name it.
His recollections of his precious time with Roger Deakin is quite moving.
A book that is even better in audio in the capable voice of Simon Bibb.
His recollections of his precious time with Roger Deakin is quite moving.
A book that is even better in audio in the capable voice of Simon Bibb.
April 4, 2022
I'm back baby lets goooo
April 20, 2019
As a boy, I spent many hours in treetops enjoying the lofty view and the change in perspective from the ground. MacFarlane opens his book with a treetop perspective also before heading out on his peregrinations that take him to the edges of Britain in search of wildness (which he certainly finds). His most profound discovery, however, is that wildness exists all around us if we just take the time to really look and see. Humanity's grip of this planet is tenuous at best - nature is always forcing itself back in and taking over as he discovered in the emptied glens of Scotland where entire villages were no more than heaps of overgrown rock and Irish dwellings abandoned by those fleeing the famine as extreme examples, or by cracked pavement where weeds spring up in our urban landscape.
While tracing his footsteps is not for the faint of heart (sleeping out on a mountain top in the midst of a Scottish winter), we can learn from his experience to look with fresh eyes at the natural world around us and appreciate it all the more for the wonder that it is. It is a very pleasant read with carefully crafted wording that rewards a slow read and an attentive mind - not unlike his rambling journeys.
While tracing his footsteps is not for the faint of heart (sleeping out on a mountain top in the midst of a Scottish winter), we can learn from his experience to look with fresh eyes at the natural world around us and appreciate it all the more for the wonder that it is. It is a very pleasant read with carefully crafted wording that rewards a slow read and an attentive mind - not unlike his rambling journeys.
July 17, 2019
1 - Robert Macfarlane's search for Britain's wilderness starts in Skye's sanctuary valley of Coruisk. Read by Richard Greenwood.
2 - The author's search moves to Strathnaver in Scotland, inhabited by man for over six millennia. Read by Richard Greenwood.
3 - The author takes a winter walk in the snowy Lake District, in his search for Britain's wilderness. Read by Richard Greenwood.
4 - Robert Macfarlane's search for Britain's wilderness moves to a reclaimed abandoned estate in Essex.
The author's search for Britain's wilderness ends up a beech tree in Cambridge.
April 23, 2024
This person has the urge to go and experience wild in person, and goes around the wild places in the UK his friends suggest. While doing this, he tells us things about them and himself and it is very entertaining. He can do all this in the UK, and without disappearing into the jungle, which is something that a lot of other writers have to do.
Just a note here too - there seems to be a nature writing triangle I am reading, Robert McFarlane is a pal of the late Roger Deakin who both know Richard Mabey. They all seem to live in the same area too
Just a note here too - there seems to be a nature writing triangle I am reading, Robert McFarlane is a pal of the late Roger Deakin who both know Richard Mabey. They all seem to live in the same area too
July 29, 2020
I don't know of any other author who writes like this. Reading his books is like being outside when you're inside and like meditating while thinking hard about something important. This book is a gift to a reader.
May 10, 2017
Robert Macfarlane is a uniquely perceptive and eloquent writer on nature and landscape. In this book he travels to various British places in search of different types and degrees of wildness.
June 5, 2019
I loved this book. The whole concept is gold and MacFarlane's understanding of the environment, nature, landscape, flora and fauna is entrancing. Whilst there were areas where I was less interested in the topic occasionally, the style, and the balance of description, personal, historical and anecdotal was spot on.
July 3, 2024
I have had an itch to travel to new places and explore the wilderness. I’ve been dying for a good hike. After finishing this book, that itch is now a full body rash. It’s such a wonderful experience being amongst the trees and the animals, and Macfarlane reignited the appreciation for it.
May 21, 2023
Een zoektocht naar wildernis in Groot-Brittannië en Ierland, met veel poëtische beschrijvingen van de natuur en volop verwijzingen naar eerdere inspiratiebronnen. Wakkert een verlangen aan om ook op zoek te gaan; aanstekelijk!
August 6, 2023
A book written with inescapable beauty and one that has spoken to me. The Wild Places thrums with the life of our amazing world. Anyone who reads Robert’s books will be deeply bewitched by the richness of his writing and manner. He is by far one of my most treasured nature writers.
Something awoke in my soul reading page after page about the overwhelming landscapes of our archipelago and his attempts at sleeping in the wild. Ancient mountains, great valleys and nature as it’s raw, all encompassing self. I feel myself constantly called to the wild and this book has helped ignite that love of exploring new ground. Tremendously poetic and sensory. Robert’s exploration takes us far and wide, from Cumbria to the farthest corners of Scotland. His friendship and adventures with the late writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin was very moving. I think it speaks volumes when there is a shared love of the planet and all its mysteries. It’s
innately spiritual and wonderful the way our energies connect with the natural world. I feel so small yet full of aching wonder.
Something awoke in my soul reading page after page about the overwhelming landscapes of our archipelago and his attempts at sleeping in the wild. Ancient mountains, great valleys and nature as it’s raw, all encompassing self. I feel myself constantly called to the wild and this book has helped ignite that love of exploring new ground. Tremendously poetic and sensory. Robert’s exploration takes us far and wide, from Cumbria to the farthest corners of Scotland. His friendship and adventures with the late writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin was very moving. I think it speaks volumes when there is a shared love of the planet and all its mysteries. It’s
innately spiritual and wonderful the way our energies connect with the natural world. I feel so small yet full of aching wonder.
July 12, 2013
A beautiful book, recounting the author’s journeys through some of Britain’s wild places, sometimes alone, and sometimes accompanied by one or two close friends who share his love of the wild. The language of the book is spell-binding, taking the reader on a parallel journey, weaving science and literature, knowledge and wonder. .
“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something that I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.”
“Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky.”
“Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.”
“Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you not only understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land – it is also a quality which can settle on a place, with a snowfall, or with the close of day.”
Read, and find yourself wanting to begin your own journey.
“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something that I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.”
“Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky.”
“Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.”
“Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you not only understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land – it is also a quality which can settle on a place, with a snowfall, or with the close of day.”
Read, and find yourself wanting to begin your own journey.
December 24, 2014
Essentially this book is a travelogue in which the author explores various parts of the UK that he considers to be "wild". The book is split into chapters, each one depicting a different type of locale - beach, mountain summit, forest, etc.
I'm not really au fait with the travelogue genre so I didn't know what to expect with this one, but I found it to be a charming read. MacFarlane has a genuine warmth and enthusiasm for his subject matter that readily transfers to the reader so that they're caught up in the journey.
It's an educational ride; in each section the author goes off on various tangents, introducing various 20th century figures who all championed their own wildernesses for various reasons. He also brings in some facts and figures, also some science here and there which I wasn't too keen on.
For the most part, though, this book charts the author's experiences as he visits various remote locations. His descriptions are evocative and compelling, emphasising the visual as you'd expect but also including sounds and textures. This is a labour of love that brings such places to life and an intimate sharing of one man's passion for untamed nature.
I'm not really au fait with the travelogue genre so I didn't know what to expect with this one, but I found it to be a charming read. MacFarlane has a genuine warmth and enthusiasm for his subject matter that readily transfers to the reader so that they're caught up in the journey.
It's an educational ride; in each section the author goes off on various tangents, introducing various 20th century figures who all championed their own wildernesses for various reasons. He also brings in some facts and figures, also some science here and there which I wasn't too keen on.
For the most part, though, this book charts the author's experiences as he visits various remote locations. His descriptions are evocative and compelling, emphasising the visual as you'd expect but also including sounds and textures. This is a labour of love that brings such places to life and an intimate sharing of one man's passion for untamed nature.
September 3, 2008
There is a yearning in Robert Macfarlane, one that we've all experienced to one extent or another: to breathe in the air that's hanging above the most obscure corners of the world; to climb a tree and become part of the scene as it pulses and heaves with life. The wonderful thing about Macfarlane is that he doesn't travel to the farthest corners to do it: he attempts to discover the rich and wild life beating under his nose, and this book is an account of his travels around the British Isles, thought to be all nicely fenced in and organized.
Macfarlane takes us along as he climbs rocks and finds storm beaches considered useless to people due to their inaccessibility, and demonstrates that these are the places we can feel most alive. His prose is more than up to the task, as every page is full of thick and chewy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which really serves to bring the wild as close as possible.
The best book I've read all year.
Macfarlane takes us along as he climbs rocks and finds storm beaches considered useless to people due to their inaccessibility, and demonstrates that these are the places we can feel most alive. His prose is more than up to the task, as every page is full of thick and chewy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which really serves to bring the wild as close as possible.
The best book I've read all year.
July 7, 2020
I was introduced to Marcfarlane's writing in Underworld and fell in love. In The Wild Places, he sets out to look at the wild places still left in the UK. Through the course of a year, he gets out into the wild (he is much more tolerant of cold than I am) and breathes in some of the most remote parts of the country. Day and night, summer and winter - he finds the beauty and the wildness that we often have lost. In the course of the year, though, he also recognizes the wildness that can be found nearby if we are only open to it. Macfarlane is also a lover of history and literature and that winds its way through his perspective and interpretation on the wild world. I not only came away from this with multiple locations on my bucket list, my list of books to read and authors to explore grew as well. Looking forward to reading more of Macfarlane's exquisite work.
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