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Macfarlane, Robert

Robert Macfarlane is an award-winning author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks and The Lost Words. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [23] 7; [36] 18; [49] 36

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20090901120357

Social Climbing

Jeremy Noel-Tod & Robert Macfarlane on The Night Climbers of Cambridge

When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, a friend was billeted at the top of the tall college gatehouse. The stairs to her room were so many that, in case of fire, a long rope, bolted to the wall and ending in a noose, was thoughtfully provided for descent to the street below. With no intercom at ground level, a social call became a real test of friendship. But why did I take the stairs when I could have been shinning up the stonework?
20170501094557 Paddy, with thanks to Joan Leigh Fermor

Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores . . . Robert Macfarlane reads Petronius

One of the first things Leigh Fermor is given in A Time of Gifts is a book: the first volume of the Loeb edition of Horace. His mother (‘she was an enormous reader’) bought it for him as a farewell present, and on its flyleaf she wrote the prose translation of an exquisite short poem by Petronius, which could hardly have been more appropriate as a valediction to her son, or indeed to anyone setting out on a voyage into adulthood.
20160301131401

The Spell of Stout Angus

Robert Macfarlane on James Stout Angus, A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect

In a poem written near the end of his life, W. S. Graham imagined himself as a ‘wordy ghost’, ‘floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary’. Like Graham – like many people – I am also a ‘wordy ghost’, who loves haunting the pages of lexicons, dictionaries and glossaries. Unlike Graham I find the pages of such books to be not ‘frozen tundra’, sterile and barren – but fabulous forests, alive with delving word-roots and spreading canopies of connotation.
20121201093449 Robert Macfarlane on A. R. B. Haldane, Slightly Foxed Issue 36

Along the Old Ways

Robert Macfarlane on A. R. B. Haldane, The Drove Roads of Scotland

For many years of my life, I was fascinated by mountains and their tops: drawn upwards by what Joe Simpson nicely calls ‘the inverted gravity’ that peaks exert upon certain people. I climbed and mountaineered – ineptly but passionately – in ranges around the world: Snowdonia, the Lake District, the Cuillins, the Cairngorms, the Alps, the Rockies, the Tian Shan, the Himalayas. All of these expeditions, from half-day to multi  month, were centred upon summits. My companions and I would scry our maps, mark the tops we wished to reach, then plan our journeys around those high points. It did not occur to me to explore a mountain without reference to its peak.

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