Macfarlane is a landscape writer; this book is a landscape book – one of the best. Its subject is old paths. Macfarlane says, “Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also.” In The Old Ways, he travels sixteen ancient paths located in England, Scotland, Spain, Tibet, and Palestine, logging his impressions as he goes. He’s a superb describer. One aspect of his writing I want to highlight here is his art of description.
The book is beautifully structured: sixteen chapters, each one chronicling a particular journey. For example, Chapter 3, titled “Chalk,” is an account of his walk along one of England’s oldest chalk paths – the Icknield Way. Here’s a sample:
I slept that night in a Neolithic dormitory on a seabed of chalk. I found my sleeping place just west of a medieval village called Pirton, through the centre of which the Way passed. I left Pirton at about nine o’clock by a wide and high-edged path that was obviously of old use, its sides grown with dog-rose, yarrow, cherry plums and damsons. I’d developed the rolling hip-sway of a sailor on shore leave, brought about by fatigue and sore joints. The evening air was hot, still; the eastern sky inky blue, orange in the west. The chalk of the path gathered the late light to itself, glowing whitely in the twilight. Pale trumpets of bindweed jumped forward to the eye. In the verge lay the part-eaten corpse of a blackbird, its scaly legs severed from its body and placed neatly alongside one another, like a knife and fork after a meal.
In Chapter 7, titled “Peat,” he walks a Hebridean footpath known as Manus’s Stones. On this journey, he finds two beehive shielings, sleeps in one and has his breakfast in the other one. He writes,
From inside, the simple but exquisite architecture of the shieling was more apparent. It was constructed of gneiss slabs that had neatly overlapped to create the corbelling. Turf had then been laid on top to act as a windbreak, insulation and mortar: a living roof that grew together and bound the gneiss in place.
In Chapter 12, called “Ice,” he joins his friend John Miceler on an expedition to Minya Konka, the highest mountain in Sichuan province, China. They follow the trails that once connected the tea-growing regions of Sichuan with Nepal and Tibet, and then the pilgrimage routes – some of them 700 years old – that converge on the peak. Here’s his description of one stage of the journey:
The morning’s ascent, on a subtle path up through sparkling oak and pine woods, was among the finest forest hours I have ever spent. Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path. The lower head of the valley was lost in haze. Another unidentifiable snow range rose above it. We might have been walking through a Chinese scroll painting. The understory of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them. Up through the trees we went, crossing iced streams and passing through tunnels of leaning oaks, following a leaf-and-dirt path. Cairns marked its route, some with niches filled with flower heads, leaves and feathers.
Most of Macfarlane’s travels are done on foot. But there are exceptions. For example, in Chapter 5 (“Water – South”), he and Ian Stephen sail a century-old cockle-shell called Broad Bay, exploring the ancient sea road from Stornoway to the Shiant Islands in the Minch, east of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland:
We pursued our long and lonely tacks, like cross-stitches made over the direct line of the sea road, zigzagging south through the Minch towards the Shiants. Inland was the grey-green Lewis coastline, with its sumping sea lochs and high headlands. Eastward, on the mainland, sun fell full on the Torridon Hills, gilding them such that I could discern peaks I’d known underfoot – Beinn Eighe, Beinn Alligin, Liathach – and whose paths I could remember well. Shifts in light changed the sea’s substance. Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.
In Chapter 13 (“Snow”), Macfarlane and his friend David Quentin traverse the Wiltshire section of the Ridgeway, one of England’s oldest paths, by means of cross-country skiing:
Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow. Where the chalk showed, it was the yellow of polar-bear fur or an old man’s knees. I found it all bleakly beautiful: the air battened down, the light at its slant. It felt both absurd and wonderful to be moving on skis over this ancient path.
My favorite part of The Old Ways is Chapter 4, titled “Silt.” It’s Macfarlane’s account of his walk along an extraordinary off-shore path called the Broomway, allegedly the deadliest path in Britain and “certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked,” Macfarlane says. It leaves the land at a place called Wakering Stairs, in Essex, and then heads due east, straight out to sea. Several hundred yards offshore, it curls northeast and runs for around three miles, still offshore, before cutting back to make landfall at Fisherman’s Head. Macfarlane is again accompanied by his friend David Quentin. In one of the book’s finest passages, Macfarlane writes,
Out and on we walked, barefoot over and into the mirror-world. I glanced back at the coast. The air was grainy and flickering, like an old newsreel. The sea wall had hazed out to a thin black strip. Structures of unknown purpose – a white-beamed gantry, a low-slung barracks – showed on the shoreline. Every few hundred yards, I dropped a white cockle shell. The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense. Sound travelled oddly. The muted pop-popping of gunfire was smudgy, but the call of a cuckoo from somewhere on the treeless shore rang sharply to us. A pale sun glared through the mist, its white eye multiplying in pools and ripples.
Macfarlane’s sense of light is exquisite: “The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense.” “Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow.” “Light pearled on barley.” “The chalk of the path gathered the late light to itself, glowing whitely in the twilight.” “A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.” “Light quibbling on the swell.” “Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.” “The sun gold in the sky, pouring down its heatless light; hard snow, high albedo.” “Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path.” “Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery.”
The book abounds with vibrant, interesting people – pathfinders, wayfarers, old-way walkers past and present: Edward Thomas, old-way walker extraordinaire, “the guiding spirit of this book”; Broomway walker Patrick Arnold; Macfarlane’s friend David Quentin, who accompanies Macfarlane on four of his walks; Ian Stephen, the savvy Stornoway sailor who guides Macfarlane on his seaway excursions; Finlay MacLeod, “a keen celebrant of the Outer Hebridean landscape”; Anne Campbell, mapper of the Bragar moorland; the Hebridean artist Steve Dilworth, whose Geocrab workshop is one of the highlights of the book; Macfarlane’s grandfather Edward Peck, “who had helped high country and wild places to cast their strong spells over me”; Nan Shephard, prose poet of the Highland landscape; Raja Shehadeh, who guides Macfarlane on two walks in occupied Palestine; Miguel Angel Blanco, creator of the amazing Library of the Forest, located in his Madrid basement; Jon Miceler, Tibetologist and mountaineer, who invites Macfarlane to join him on an expedition to Minya Konka; Eric Ravilious, English landscape painter and “path-obsessive.”
The most interesting and vibrant “character” of all is Macfarlane himself. His keen, active, perceptive, responsive “I” is present on almost every page: “I slept that night in a Neolithic dormitory on a seabed of chalk.” “I climbed to the top of Eilean an Taighe and followed its southeastern cliff-edges.” “Down on the storm beach, as dusk approached, I spent an hour building a small domed and chambered cairn out of dolerite, for the pleasure of the act of construction.” “I walked on south-east all that day towards the Isle of Harris, following shieling path, croft path, drover’s road and green way, stitching a route together.” “I placed my handful of bog myrtle, azalea, juniper and dried heather on a natural ortholith of granite, and set then alight: a brief flare of orange in the dusk, a beacon-fire at the pass.” “I slipped off my rucksack, socks and shoes, left them all in the shadow of the first peak, and set off to investigate the ridge and scramble its rocks.” “I approached Segovia across baking plains.” “I passed dew ponds and tumuli, and a big field mushroom lying upside-down on its cap, its black gills like the charred pages of a book.”
I’ve been quoting extensively, perhaps excessively. But I can’t resist. This book is as layered and loaded as a honeycomb. So many great passages! Here’s one more. This one is from Chapter 7 (“Peat”):
The sun set over the Atlantic. The water a sea-silver that scorched the eye, and within the burn of the sea’s metal the hard black back of an island, resilient in the fire, and through it all the sound of gull-cry and wave-suck, the sense of rock rough underhand, machair finely lined as needlepoint, and about the brinks other aspects of the moment of record: the iodine tang of seaweed, and a sense of peninsularity – of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.
Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone essay. But they’re all linked. They flow chronologically one to the next, beginning and ending on the chalk. They’re also linked by the spirit of Edward Thomas, who is the book’s presiding deity. “He ghosted my journeys and urged me on,” Macfarlane says. The penultimate chapter, “Ghost,” is an inspired re-creation of what Thomas was doing and thinking during the days leading up to his death at the Battle of Arras, April 9, 1917.
I want to go back to that first passage I quoted from The Old Ways: “Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also.” What does Macfarlane mean when he says “and the mind’s eye also”? I think he’s referring to his imagination. He not only vividly describes the paths as they are; he imagines how they used to be and who used to walk them. Two examples: (1) Macfarlane sleeping outdoors at a place on the chalk downs called Chanctonbury Ring: “After I’d eaten, I lay down to sleep, placed an ear to the turf and imagined the depths of history the soil held – Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, Augustan, down through all of which the beech roots quested”; (2) Macfarlane tracking the tracks of a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, feeling a co-presence – “the prehistoric and the present matching up such that it is unclear who walks in whose tracks.”
In future posts, I’ll delve more deeply into this great book, exploring its structure, action, description, and meaning. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Roger Deakin’s brilliant Waterlog.
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