Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2014
In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane travels Britain’s ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, under-appreciated landscape.
Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world – a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit our imaginations.
‘The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane’s reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature’ Scotland on Sunday
Along the Old Ways
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...
Read moreLeave 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...
Read moreRobert Macfarlane: ‘When I first read A Time of Gifts I felt it in my feet. It spoke to my soles . . .’
Listen to Robert Macfarlane reading from The Gifts of Reading. Recorded especially for Adventures for Harriet: a 600-mile literary pilgrimage across Europe by foot.
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