I love to walk. I’m not so much someone who gets out to the countryside, though; my favourite walks are undertaken in cities and towns. This is part of the reason I never did the Oxford thing and buy a bike: I enjoy the 10-20 minute walks from my (north Oxford) college to the Bodleian, or Exam Schools, or Jericho. Walking allows one to think and observe at a pace that rejects the sedentary nature of library-bound work, whilst enabling the walker to take in the world around him that a quicker pace (in a car, on a bike or even running) wouldn’t allow. The Old Ways, a travel book that explores the significance of walking to Robert Macfarlane (an award-winning travel writer), to various walking enthusiasts and literary figures, and across the world’s cultures, is an exemplary ode to the stroll.
Bar Macfarlane himself, the central figure of The Old Ways is the Edwardian poet and travel writer Edward Thomas. Yet Macfarlane also devotes a significant portion of his book to the artist Eric Ravilious. Though Ravilious began his career as a mural and printer, his story is filled with the same spirit as Thomas’. Just as Thomas wrote books and essays on the various walks he would take around Britain, Ravilious painted the English landscape, perhaps most memorably those figures like the Long Man of Wilmington, or the Cerne Abbas Giant, or the Uffington White Horse, etched in ancient times (or perhaps by pranksters in the 18th century) into the chalk beds of South England. I’m not sure that he was as well known in the interwar years as Macfarlane says he was, but his paintings have become part of the canon of English landscape art.
The value of Macfarlane’s book lies not in overt appreciation for nature’s beauty, but in reflecting on landscape and travel’s relationship with life in all its aspects. There are episodes of comic misfortune (like Macfarlane falling off his bike when racing through a field) and tragedy. Mountaineers, for instance, often find difficult paths lined with the frozen vomit, or blood, or corpses of predecessors who had succumbed to altitude sickness and exhaustion. Macfarlane at one point tells the story of a woman who came across the body of her father, preserved by the freezing cold where he had fallen decades before.
The landscape is not a neutral backdrop, but is changed by those living in it, and has changed them. Neither is it picturesque. We think of perky walkers striding through the countryside, trying to get closer to nature. But tramps, lacking ties to a home or job, are fundamentally walkers. Land is political: one thinks of the unemployed and near-starving marching from Jarrow during the Great Depression to highlight their plight; Macfarlane discusses his travels in Palestine, hindered by entrenched barriers and borders. Religion has ties too, from pilgrimages to mass conversions on and around grassy knolls. Ghosts haunt the highways, byways and moors up and down Britain.
Referring to those pre-modern chalk figures etched into hills, Macfarlane quotes the historian Kitty Hauser: ‘What is astonishing to the point of uncanniness is the way in which these ancient features … secretly share the landscape with the living, as they go about their business’. This is a gentler book than Macfarlane’s previous two, which focused on the dangerous wilderness (and even contained a description of Macfarlane whittling down his own frozen fingers with a knife). But it’s no less powerful for that. The Old Ways celebrates landscape as ‘a volatile participant’, as a dynamic being filled with memories, history and folklore. The Old Ways will teach you a lesson in observation and appreciation, carrying you along at a quick yet steady pace.
The Old Ways by Robert McFarlane is published by Hamish Hamilton and is available here.
