The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made. The pilgrim on the kora contents himself always with looking up and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto knowledge.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Macfarlane, Robert The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Macfarlane, Robert

The miniature sandscapes of ridge and valley pressed into the soles of my feet and for days after the walk I would feel a memory of that pressure and pattern.His excursions almost always end with hallucinations as if prolonged walking suddenly gives access to another dimension of reality in which ghosts, panthers and other unlike 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. To make an impression is also to receive one and the souls of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines.

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane – review | Science and

Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there when you cross a certain watershed, recline or snowline, or enter rain, storm or mist.In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.

The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot - Google Books The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot - Google Books

It is difficult, given the set-up, structure, content and highly-educated British nature of it all, not to compare MacFarlane’s journey to that other erudite, epic walker of British extraction, Leigh Fermor. There isn't much of a progression, more a meandering of thought, so no pressure to complete the book. How tragic to give so much and then, come home to meander aimlessly without a purpose, or place to stay.To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring. This wish for a “between space,” somewhere sacred and apart from the present, halfway between the past and the future, where time is all one and all time is beautiful reminded me a great deal of T. When Macfarlane describes the "Guga Hunters", groups that since the at least the 16th century have appeared for 2 weeks every year to cull the flock of Gannets (sea birds) on the island of Sula Sgeir, it is a memorable vignette of an age-old tradition, seemingly untouched by the passing centuries.

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane | Waterstones The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane | Waterstones

With its global reach and mysterious Sebaldian structure, this is MacFarlane's most important book yet' David Rothenberg, author of Survival of the Beautiful and Thousand Mile Song'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. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas.It felt odd to be on rock again, not sea, to think of the ground on which I lay extending down to the floor of the Minch. Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks. In short, then, the book wanders down some side paths of its own and, in the spirit of it all, readers are more than happy to come along.