3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Lawrence Osborne's "The Wet and the Dry"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Osborne’s superb The Wet and the Dry.

Begin in Milan, at the mega-swank Town House Galleria. 6:10 pm, Osborne is in his element, in the lounge, having a gin and tonic:

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

I love that passage. It’s the book’s opening paragraph. What an opener! I love its celebration of drink. I love its celebration of pleasure. Osborne is a hedonist. His god, as he says later, is Dionysus – “god as summer’s light itself.”

What happens when a Dionysian travels in the Muslim world? How does he respond to prohibition? Where does he find a drink? Does he find a drink? These are the questions that drive Osborne’s narrative. In his view, the relevant dichotomy isn’t East/West; it’s Wet/Dry. He struggles to comprehend Dry. At one point, remembering a time when he was in the religious city of Solo, in Java, he says, “Six hundred thousand people, I kept thinking, and not a single bar. It seemed like a recipe for madness.”

The Wet and the Dry consists of fifteen chapters. Each one tells about a particular trip and a particular drinking experience. For example, chapter 2, delectably titled “A Glass of Arak in Beirut,” finds Osborne in his natural element – a bar. This one is in the Bristol Hotel, Beirut. He writes,

At Le Bristol, as soon as I am alone and the lights have come up, I order a vodka martini shaken and chilled with a canned olive speared on a stick – being shaken in the Bond manner, the drink is actually less alcoholic in its effects because more of the ice passes into the concoction. I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools. It is l’heure du cocktail, and I am content.

Osborne likes drinking alone. Later in the book, he approvingly quotes Luis Buñuel’s definition of the perfect bar: “The bar is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable – and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn’t like to talk.”

Sipping his vodka martini at the bar in the Bristol, Osborne is content: “I light a cigarette and wonder if it is still allowed – even here in Beirut – and then I melt like a raindrop into the vodka martini itself. Vodka and smoke go well together, they seem to have been conjured out of the same essence.”

Wherever he is, whatever city he’s visiting – Milan, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat, Islamabad, Istanbul, Cairo – Osborne seeks bars. “One needs a bar almost as much as one needs oxygen,” he says. Some are mentioned just in passing, others are fondly described in detail. Here, for example, is his depiction of the Windsor bar in Cairo:

The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officer’s mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.

He goes on:

The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.

Interestingly, in a book drenched in alcohol, one of its most transfixing parts has nothing to do with drink. It’s an account of Osborne’s visit to the Nurettin Cerrah Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school in the back streets of Istanbul. Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, takes him there. Osborne writes,

Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skull caps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.

Eventually, Osborne and Sébastien move into the main prayer room where they witness an astonishing event:

A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.

The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.

Osborne is an excellent describer. In the book’s final chapter, “Twilight at the Windsor Hotel,” there’s a long extraordinary passage that takes us deep into Cairo’s back alleys. Here’s an excerpt:

In downtown once can keep moving from baladi to baladi, because they have not yet been closed down, but you have to know where they are: using them requires a casual street knowledge that can be picked up only orally or through incessant trial and error. None of them are advertised. Most lie at the bottom of narrow unlit alleys and passageways, and no city is more a labyrinth than Cairo. Off 26th July, again, but closer to Tahrir Square, there is a strange place called the Nile Munchen, with its outdoor restaurant closed in all sides by the backs of tenements and its ground floor belly-dance bar. There is the touristy El-Hourreys, where the foreign journalists like to pose, and the seedier and more heartfelt Cap d’Or off Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, a den of dark varnished wood paneling and glaring light, where men pass between the all-male tables selling pistachios.

There is the splendid gloom of the Horris, a bar elevated above 26th July by a flight of steps and concealed behind anonymous glass doors, and the lofty hotel bar of the Odeon near Marouf, with its decayed oil paintings and terrible food and a terrace where sooty winds embrace the drinker.

I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril – a barman in a neat white turban – and hang about inside them like a fly that cannot quite decide where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplating death and the inconsequential things that come just before it.

I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men disheveled and worn-down looking in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.

Osborne worries that bars like Cap d’Or are endangered by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. This is the issue that haunts his book. What if religious fundamentalism becomes the norm, not just in the Middle East, but across the world? For him, bars represent freedom.

In future posts, I’ll explore this remarkable book further. My next post in this series will be on structure. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Roger Deakin's "Waterlog"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Deakin’s wonderful Waterlog.

“The warm rain tumbled from the gutter in one of those midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind my house in Suffolk and took shelter in the moat.” Thus begins this magnificent amphibious travel journal – an account of Deakin’s “long swim through Britain.” His moat is where the journey first suggests itself, and where it begins. It’s where he’s bathed for years, “swimming breaststroke for preference.” He says he’s “not a champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina.”

Deakin is inspired by John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer” (The New Yorker, July 18, 1964), in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours’ swimming pools. Deakin says, “One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country.’ ”

Deakin’s journey curves across the country, too: Hampshire, Cambridge, Norfolk, Wales, Worcestershire, Dartmoor, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Argyll, Jura, Northumberland, Essex, Kent, Somerset, London. Deakin travels to all these places and more. Everywhere he goes, he seeks out places to swim – beaches, bays, rock pools, rivers, streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools, aqueducts, flooded quarries, canals, even drains. The older and wilder these places are the better. “In wild water,” he says, “you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level.”

The book unfolds in thirty-six chapters, each chronicling at least one of Deakin’s swimming excursions. His first trip, on April 23, 1997, is to the Scilly Isles, where he plunges into the frigid waters of Great Popplestones Bay:

I stripped off and ran naked in the water, screaming inwardly with the sudden agony of it. It was scaldingly cold, and the icy waters kept on tearing pain through me until I got moving and swam a few frantic strokes as children do on their first visit to the deep end, then scrambled out breathless with cold; a mad moment of masochism. So much for the fabled caress of the gentle Gulf Stream. I climbed straight into my wetsuit and swam comfortably out again into the amazing clear water in a flat calm, crossed the little bay, marvelling at the brightness of everything, and swam back again. The sand was white and fine, and shone up through the water. Small dead crabs floated amongst the thin line of shredded bladderwrack and tiny shells oscillating up the beach. The silence was disturbed only by nature’s bagpipes, the incessant gulls. I climbed out onto the rocks that glinted gold with quartz and mica, stripped off the wetsuit, and laydown to dry in the sun. Spread out next to me, it looked like another sunbather.

Deakin’s descriptions of his swims are superb – vivid, sensuous, evocative. Here’s one from Chapter 3 (“Lords of the Fly”). He’s in Winchester, searching along the banks of the River Test for a once-popular bathing place called Gunnar’s Hole. He eventually finds it. Its motionless surface is entirely covered by “a classic duckweed lawn.” He writes,

The massive concrete walls of the pool were in surprisingly good condition, and, on the basis that stolen fruit always tastes sweetest, I climbed through the concrete river inlet sluice to drop in silently at the deep end. Sinking through the opaque green cloak was like breaking the ice. I laboured down the hundred yards of the pool, mowing a path in the lawn which closed behind me as I went. Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green. The water beneath was still deep, but no longer the ten feet it used to be below the diving boards. It had silted up to between five and seven feet. Reaching down, I felt soft mud and ancient fallen branches, and sensed giant pike and eels. 

I love that passage. That “Moorhens scampered off, half-flying over the billiard-baize green” is brilliant. Here’s another one, this from Chapter 11 (“Salmon-Runs”). Deakin is in Dartmoor, swimming across the River Dart estuary:

I had crossed to the centre of the wide bay from the Coastguard’s Beach. A little group of surfers clustered waist deep, waiting for the big grey rollers that surged out of the open sea, breaking on a sandbar. I threw myself in with them and swam inland. I felt the incoming tide lock on to my legs and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed was all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shadows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out on the beach like a turtle, but couldn’t resist dropping back into the muscular current for a second ride down the channel. 

I can practically feel that seaweed “sliding down each new wave to drape itself around me.” Deakin’s writing brims with the physical experience of wild swimming. That “I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved” is inspired! At times, it almost seems that Deakin is part fish. But there are limits to what he’s willing to tackle. He loves the water, but he also fears it. We see this in Chapter 23 (“Orwell’s Whirlpool”), where he considers swimming the channel between the Hebridean islands of Jura and Scarba. The channel, called the Gulf of Corryvreckan, contains a menacing whirlpool. Deakin writes,

The whirlpool was clearly visible, three hundred yards offshore towards the western end of the gulf. Inside its circumference was a mêlée of struggling white breakers, charging about in every direction, head-butting one another. Outside, the surface was deadly smooth. The neatly-folded swimming trunks in my rucksack felt somehow irrelevant as I stood by the shore, feeling a very tiny figure, unable to take my eyes away from the epicentre of the vortex. It seemed scarcely credible that a swimmer could have made this crossing from Jura to Scarba.

Deakin wants to swim it. He says, “The whirlpool and the gulf were the quintessence of the wildness of Jura.” The whirlpool both fascinates him and scares him. He decides not to swim it. “I had to face the fact that I wasn’t going to swim the Corryvreckan, at least not on this occasion.” He leaves Jura with his spirits “more than a little dashed.” He resolves to return one day and try again.

Deakin’s spirits soon revive. In one of my favorite parts – Chapter 31 (“A Mill-race”) – he travels to Norfolk in search of a pool on the River Bure. The pool is called John’s Water. He finds it near a solitary mill cottage by a twin-arched red brick bridge. “A vigorous mill-race sped through one of the arches, darting its turbulence far out into a wide black pool which whirled evenly between dense banks of weeds and watercress.” Deakin sheds his clothes, dons his trunks, and wades into the icy water. He writes,

The fine gravel bed was shallow at first, then shelved deeper into the mill-pond. I plunged in and was soon out of my depth, swimming with the eddy up towards the mill-race where it spouted from the bridge. Then I launched myself into it and shot downriver into the weed-carpeted shallows. I swam on, in water that reached halfway up my thighs if I stood up, much as ice reaches halfway up a champagne bottle in a bucket. The river was embroidered with such vivid green braids of water buttercup that I half expected to meet Ophelia lying on the bottom, garlanded unseasonably in its white flowers. I was swimming down an ice-floe, but it was so clear, so sweet, so lush that I soon warmed to the cold and paddled and waded back up through the eddies, gathering watercress as I went. This was of the best crops of wild, untutored cress I had ever seen, let alone picked. It banked up along the dusky river like green cumulus clouds. I circled the pool twice more, shooting the rapids of the mill-race, crazed with the opiate cocktail the brain and body must have sluiced into my frozen veins.

I love that “champagne bottle in a bucket” image. Deakin’s words call up pictures. He’s a great writer – active, direct, specific, vibrant, sensuous. Waterlog is his masterpiece. In future posts, I’ll explore it further. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Lawrence Osborne’s splendid The Wet and the Dry. 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Robert Macfarlane's "The Old Ways"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of The Old Ways. 

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. 

On the Horizon: "3 Great Thematic Travelogues"

I enjoyed doing “3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place” so much that I’ve decided to keep it going. For my new series, I’ve chosen three brilliant thematic travelogues – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013). Each is a collection of travel essays threaded with a theme – walking (The Old Ways), swimming (Waterlog), drinking (The Wet and the Dry). The books are beautifully written. I want to study them in detail. A new series then – “3 Great Thematic Travelogues” – starting January 1, 2026.