A walk with ghosts of time and place

Senior Features Writer

Saturday 9 June 2012

Reading the early pages of Robert Macfarlane's latest book, I suddenly had a flashback to a 1970s Marvel comic called Skull The Slayer.

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I can't remember much about the comic at all but I do have a vivid memory of one image in which our hero was at the top of the page looking down on a kind of curling, Guggenheim-esque, continuous twist of landscape down which at different levels different historical eras could be seen. It was a pulp vision of history not only as a continuum but also as contemporaneous, as if the past itself was not really past.

In many ways – if admittedly at a much more elevated level – the nature writer Robert Macfarlane is saying something similar in The Old Ways, his book on walking ancient pathways and tracks. It essays the notion of walking as a form of time travel, as a way of touching what went before. Near the beginning he talks of a trip he made with his friend, the late Roger Deakin, in Dorset through a landscape rife with stories of 17th-century religious persecution and fugitive aristocrats fleeing 20th-century pursuers. At dusk, he says, "these pasts felt excitingly alive and coexistent – as if time had somehow pleated back on itself". The Old Ways spends its time chasing all our yesterdays. Macfarlane walks across Maplin Sands and the English Downs, sails between Scottish islands, climbs the Cairngorms, carries out acts of civil disobedience in Palestine and treads the pilgrim trail in Spain. As he does so he pursues the book's ghosts – his own diplomat grandfather, the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd, and, most of all, the English poet Edward Thomas. Macfarlane's account of Thomas's last days in the First World War trenches near the end of the book is a remarkable setpiece, concise, elegant and heartbreaking.The rest of the book is, understandably, taken at walking pace. The result is a rich, leisurely meander through countryside and custom that concentrates on the exteriors Macfarlane sees and the interior thoughts they prompt. Writing about Shepherd he notes: "What Shepherd understood - was that landscape has long offered us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought - she understood herself to be in some way thought by place." (And for Shepherd read Macfarlane.)All nature writing is an attempt to write us into the landscape. It requires language to be sensual, to have its own tangible physicality. And that is Macfarlane's great achievement: the tactility of his prose. Light is "eely", chalk shows through "the yellow of polar-bear fur or an old man's knees", midges rise like "smoke". More than that, though, Macfarlane is also attempting to place writing itself into the landscape. He is "reading" what he sees, "the rich text" of birdprints and footmarks, attempting, to make a mark on the landscape.As a confirmed urbanist, my heart did leap at the moment he talks of the busy waters of the English Channel where the world "is reduced to code - The number of data streams is minimised; inputs are reduced to night-murmurs on the VHF, blips of the radar and sequences of light ..." Because that has a real beauty too. But if we must leave the city then let it be in the pages of a book like this, where, between gorgeous endpapers (a British geological map marbled with strata), you can feel the burn in the muscle and the ooze of mud between your toes, and still be within a kettle-switch of a cup of tea.Robert MacfarlaneHamish Hamilton, £20the old ways

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A walk with ghosts of time and place

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