The New York Times Book Review
…an iconoclastic blend of natural history, travel writing and much more…To describe Macfarlane as a philosopher of walking is to undersell the achievement of The Old Ways: his prose feels so firmly grounded, resistant to abstraction. He wears his polymath intelligence lightly as his mind roams across geology, archaeology, fauna, flora, architecture, art, literature and urban design, retrieving small surprises everywhere he walks…Macfarlane has given us a gorgeous book about physical movement and the movement of memory, one that resounds with stories told to "the beat of the placed and lifted foot."
—Rob Nixon
Publishers Weekly
This scintillating travelogue is a celebration of well-worn footpaths and ancient sea routes. Naturalist MacFarlane (The Wild Places) traipses across Britain via Stone-Age trails, sand flats that briefly emerge between daily tides, and sea lanes to the Hebridean Isles. He ventures abroad into the bullet-strewn hills of the West Bank and follows a pilgrimage route in Spain. Along the way, the author meets artists, poets, farmers, sea-bird hunters, and adventurers, each with stories to tell and idiosyncratic attitudes toward the terrain ahead. MacFarlane writes with a discerning eye and an immediacy that immerses us in his surroundings—whether a delicately misty shore, a seemingly chaotic field of rocks that reveals hidden patterns, or a holy Himalayan mountain that makes him " up, neck cricked and mouth bashed open at the beauty of it all." MacFarlane strikes a fine balance between lyrical nature writing and engrossing scholarship that makes him the ideal walking companion. (Oct. 15)
From the Publisher
Praise for The Old Ways:
“With a steady command of the literature and history of each place he visits, [Macfarlane] tries ‘to read landscapes back into being.’ His sentences bristle with the argot of cartographers, geologists, zoologists, and botanists.” —The New Yorker
“Macfarlane explores the meditative aspects of being a pedestrian…not so much a travelogue as a travel meditation, it favors lush prose, colorful digressions…if you’ve ever had the experience, while walking, of an elusive thought finally coming clear or an inspiration surfacing after a long struggle, The Old Ways will speak to you – eloquently and persuasively.” —The Seattle Times
“A backpack of assorted expeditions charted by a writer whose poetic and scientific skills are equal to one another…there are some splendid set pieces.” —The Wall Street Journal
“A wonderfully meandering account of the author’s peregrinations and perambulations through England, Scotland, Spain, Palestine, and Sichuan…Macfarlane’s particular gift is his ability to bring a remarkably broad and varied range of voices to bear on his own pathways and to do so with a pleasingly impressionist yet tenderly precise style.” —Aengus Woods, themillions.com
"Macfarlane seems to know and have read everything…his every sentence rewrites the landscape in language crunchy and freshly minted and deeply textured. Surely the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years." —Pico Iyer
"Luminous, possessing a seemingly paradoxical combination of the dream-like and the hyper-vigilant, The Old Ways is, as with all of Macfarlane's work, a magnificent read. Each sentence can carry astonishing discovery." —Rick Bass
“In Macfarlane, British travel writing has a formidable new champion… Macfarlane is read above all for the beauty of his prose and his wonderfully innovative and inventive way with language…he can write exquisitely about anywhere.” —William Dalrymple, The Observer
“In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made…the walking of paths is, to [Macfarlane], an education, and symbolic, too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing, wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and behind.” —Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
"A wonderful evocation of Britain's natural beauty and a reminder of our need to connect with the wilderness" ― Times (London)
"Time and again he takes the reader's breath away" ― Financial Times
"A beautiful and inspiring book." ― Independent (London)
"A marvellously evocative portrait of place."― Sunday Telegraph (London)
"A beautifully modulated call from the wild, that will ensorcell any urban prisoner wishing to break free." ― Will Self
"A powerful and passionate book, essential reading." ― Daily Mail
New York Times Book Review
The Old Ways celebrates the civility of paths, thin lines of tenacious community threaded through an ‘aggressively privatized world.’ There is something sustaining about that tenacity, and something humbling too…We are, after all, just passers-by.”
Guardian (London)
In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys, and there are no clear divisions to be made…The walking of paths is, to [Macfarlane], an education, and symbolic, too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing, wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and behind…This is a spacious and inclusive book, which allows for many shifts in emphasis, and which, like the best paths, is always different when you go back to look at it again.”
Sunday Times (London)
From the very first page…you know that the most valuable thing about The Old Ways is going to be the writing…I found myself hoarding images like trophies as I turned the pages…It is like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems…You never get the feeling that the poetry is being used to prettify what he sees. His omnivorous eye takes in everything, and his camera-shutter brain records it.”
acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer
I don’t give blurbs but I have to make an exception for Robert Macfarlane. He seems to know and have read everything, he steadily walks and climbs through places that most of us would shy away from and his every sentence rewrites the landscape in language crunchy and freshly minted and deeply textured. He never takes a short cut and he makes the long road seem like life itself. Surely the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years.”
Independent (London)
In the Romantic tradition, Macfarlane connects inner with outer and shows how place and mind interpenetrate…He grapples objectively with facts…and is a respectful user of cartography, archeology, and natural history. But he is also fascinated by himself, his pleasures, fears, tiredness, and the state of his feet. He is equally alert to the human history associated with these walks.”
Spectator (London)
Here is a book by a writer who, above almost everything else, and most valuably, is an enthusiast about what it means to put one foot in front of the other…Fine writing—in the sense of precise, careful, and original prose; lyrical without being pretentious—does exist. Macfarlane is an example of it. His virtuosity isn’t unobtrusive…You see these trees and pathways, you hear those birds. And there really are few prose writers who take such a poet’s care with cadence…A book about what we put into landscape, and what it puts into us. If you submit to its spell you finish it in different shape than you set out: a bit wiser, a bit lonelier, a bit happier, a whole lot better informed.”
prizewinning author Penelope Lively
I am a longstanding admirer of Robert Macfarlane’s work, and I was enthralled by this new book—again, a marvelous marriage of scholarship, imagination, and evocation of place. I read him for vicarious experience—he takes me to places I can never visit, never could have visited. He creates for his readers landscapes in the mind, and the largesse of his references sends you off into all kinds of ancillary reading. I always feel exhilarated after reading Macfarlane.”
New York Times bestselling author Colin Thubron
Macfarlane immerses himself in regions we may have thought familiar, resurrecting them newly potent and sometimes beautifully strange. In a moving achievement, he returns our heritage to us.”
Telegraph (London)
A magnificent meditation on walking and writing…This is not a book about the history of pedestrianism nor the outward bound movement but something consciously set much higher than that: a sequence of sixteen long meditations on the place of walking in human consciousness, each set in a different, sparklingly realized stretch of the world.”
award-winning author Adam Nicolson
A magnificent and beautiful book, the best Macfarlane has written. The Old Ways shows that landscape is more than a route to understanding; it actually is understanding, at least when known and felt in that material-ethereal way of which Macfarlane is the master.”
AudioFile
Narrator Robin Sachs sets an entrancing tone for the essays, luxuriating in the scenic descriptions and poetic language. Sachs will have listeners enchanted by historical details, smiling at the people met along the way, and cringing at the harsh realities of nature. Sachs gives each speaker a perfect accent, infusing every word and sentence with remarkable beauty. The essays are uplifting yet realistic, awe inspiring, eerie, and filled with so many details that memory retention would be difficult without the print version. For a simply enjoyable listening experience, this audiobook is a treat. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.”
Observer (London)
In Macfarlane, British travel writing has a formidable new champion…Macfarlane’s recklessly poetic and sometimes almost mystical speculations are always very firmly rooted in the precision of his observation and reporting and irrigated by the wide variety of different interests he brings to his book…[He] can also tell a good story and is companionable and funny…Above all, perhaps, Macfarlane brings to his books his love and knowledge of the natural world, and so cross-fertilizes the rich till of his travel writing with the loam of another very English tradition of observational literature: nature writing…He is poetic and lyrical in his approach to the natural world but can also be precise and scientific…Macfarlane is read above all for the beauty of his prose and his wonderfully innovative and inventive way with language…He stoops with unerring accuracy on his prey—the perfect image, the most elusive metaphor—and he can write exquisitely about anywhere.”
Evening Standard (London)
A beautifully composed new book about walking and the imagination…Macfarlane doesn’t just observe, he participates and he has the prose to recreate the intensity of life for the reader…Sentence after sentence delivers thrilling perception…Macfarlane himself is the most observant, imaginative, and accomplished wayfarer we have.”
Library Journal
Walking is an intimate way to experience a landscape because it proceeds at a pace that lets travelers contemplate nature, history, and self. In his travels around Great Britain and other countries, Macfarlane (English, Univ. of Cambridge; The Wild Places) follows a variety of old paths (called "ways") on both land and sea, some that date back thousands of years. This highly readable narrative weaves together landscape, local history and myth, art, literature, natural history, ritual, and the internal dialog familiar to any who have spent time alone in nature. The people he meets and the places he visits are luminous and extraordinary in the retelling as Macfarlane explores the idea of place and of self as well as the close relationship between the two. The book closes with a brief biography of fellow path walker and author Edward Thomas (1878–1917), from whom Macfarlane draws inspiration throughout the work. VERDICT The author's love of the land and his elegant use of metaphor make for a moving book that anyone who loves being part of nature will treasure.—Sheila Kasperek, North Hall Lib., Mansfield Univ. of PA
NOVEMBER 2012 - AudioFile
This audiobook is part travelogue, part history lesson detailing the author’s experiences while walking the old ways—paths, roads, and trails—of his native Great Britain and other parts of the world. Narrator Robin Sachs sets an entrancing tone for the essays, luxuriating in the scenic descriptions and poetic language. Sachs will have listeners enchanted by historical details, smiling at the people met along the way, and cringing at the harsh realities of nature. Sachs gives each speaker a perfect accent, infusing every word and sentence with remarkable beauty. The essays are uplifting yet realistic, awe inspiring, eerie, and filled with so many details that memory retention would be difficult without the print version. For a simply enjoyable listening experience, this audiobook is a treat. M.M.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
Macfarlane (English/Cambridge Univ.; The Wild Places, 2008, etc.) returns with another masterful, poetic travel narrative. The author's latest, focusing broadly on the concept of walking, forms what he calls "a loose trilogy," with his two earlier books, Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, "about landscape and the human heart." As in his previous books, it seems nearly impossible that a writer could combine so many disparate elements into one sensible narrative. It's ostensibly a first-person travelogue (of England, Spain, Palestine, Tibet and other locales), combined with biographical sketches (such as that of poet Edward Thomas, who died on a battlefield in France in 1917) and historical anecdotes about a wide variety of subjects (e.g., a set of 5,000-year-old footprints made by a family along the coastline just north of Liverpool). In the hands of a lesser writer, these divergent ideas would almost certainly result in unreadable chaos, but Macfarlane effortlessly weaves them together under the overarching theme of "walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move." While this notion may seem abstract, the author's resonant prose brings it to life--whether he is writing about the mountains of Tibet, where a half-frozen stream is "halted mid-leap in elaborate forms of yearning," or the mountains of Scotland to which he returned for his grandfather's funeral, where he found "moonlight shimmering off the pine needles and pooling in the tears of resin wept by the pines." A breathtaking study of "walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape."
