Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways

 

From the praise lavished on Robert Macfarlane by the critics, I expected this book to be something extraordinary. “Outstanding”, “magnificent”, “utterly beautiful”, “sets the imagination tingling” are words from the paperback edition (published 2012). 

The book

This is an account of several walks (or boat trips) that the author made. At the same time, it is an anthology of writing about walking. The book includes references to many of literature’s well-known walkers, including Rousseau, Wordsworth, Clare, Borrow – it’s no surprise that the bibliography cites the anthology The Vintage Book of Walking. But it is not just a set of references to well-known walkers and nature writers. 

Vocabulary

The book is consciously poetic: he constantly strives for artistic effect, yet the result is far less effective than W G Sebald, because Macfarlane seems to be trying so hard to write beautiful and arresting prose, rather than having something to say: or, to be more specific, because I don’t much like what the author has to say, in Macfarlane’s case.

His technique is to stop you in your tracks while reading, by choosing an unusual word, or by using a word in an unusual context. For example, on the first page, describing the tracks made by human walking, he compares natural tracks to walking on asphalt and concrete, “substances not easily impressed”. Once or twice this trick makes you think; but every time it happens, you stop and read again when you encounter an unusual word or context. The author builds up a list of similar words, pointing out how they “become a poem or rite” (just to remind us of the poetical associations): ”holloways, bostles, shuts, driftways, lichways … “ and so on. Then we have path markers: “cairns, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, longstones, milestones … “ Yet after enunciating all these magic terms for natural walks, Macfarlane walks across a golf course for his first chapter: golf courses, the negation, almost the denial of landscape. Golfers are in the landscape, but do their best to ignore it. 

 Elsewhere, you feel a thesaurus has been brought into play. “Wordsworth’s … knobbly legs … were magnificent shanks” [p16]. Dorset is “webbed with paths”. Walking is also described as “tramping”, and “meandering”.  The trope of switching subject and object occurs frequently, for example “when a white object achieves perfect tuning against snow … so the object is absorbed into the snow – or, audaciously, absorbs the snow into it.” [p412]. The trick of using words to highlight polysemy is emphasised: “they exist on two planes (plains)” [p412], as if the multiple meanings enrich the text. 

Is this vocabulary intended to convey meaning, or simply a vague “poetic effect”? I can’t help feeling sometimes that the words used are less specific than Macfarlane suggests. Names of plants, animals and birds are used frequently and appear to me to be far more specific than  is possible. In Sussex, the author walks along the edge of the River Cuckmere : “my boot marks joined the tracks of heron, cormorant, gull and egret”. I don’t imagine all of those prints would be distinguishable by him. Instead, it is another example of a piling up of names. 

Walking and paths

“Paths are the habits of a landscape”. Does he mean the apparel, what a landscape wears? Does he mean the common activities carried out in the landscape? Or the parts of a landscape that are so familiar to us? None of the meanings quite fits; the narrative does not flow. But that seems to be the intention. 

“Paths connect. That is their first duty and their chief reason for being.” I don’t agree; Macfarlane’s use of paths is not to go anywhere. The use he describes is leisure walking, where you are happy to walk towards no particular destination, simply for the pleasure of the walk. The purpose of the path is for you to immerse yourself in an imaginary natural universe where plants and animals have more of a chance than in the rest of the built environment. You like it when the trees overhang and the vegetation is slightly wild. You are seeking an experience of “nature” as somehow being more authentic than the modern world we live in for most of the time. Macfarlane walks the Broomway path to Foulness Island, and when he gets there, he turns round and comes back again, partly because you aren’t allowed on Foulness without a permit, although he doesn’t mention this. Nor does he mention there is a perfectly good road to Foulness Island.

 “Paths are consensual … because without common care and common practice they disappear”. I would argue that most footpaths in England, and probably elsewhere, are anything but consensual. They may have their origin in ancient rights of way and  droveways, but the reality is that they only exist today because the authorities, often reluctantly, concede their official existence; the local interests are usually keen to remove them, to make them as unpleasant as possible, to make it clear to users that their use by the public is tolerated at best. Farmers and land-owners lock gates, make stiles impassable, and it is only rambling organisations who fight to preserve access. That is an aspect of paths that seems not to interest the author, who displays a curious innocence on this point. Not everyone loves footpaths. In Palestine, where you might get shot for walking on a path, he describes his fear – but that is a war zone, and is an exception to his typical depiction of paths. 

Perhaps the best descriptions of nature are those that don’t set out only to be descriptions. Such descriptions are like the worst kind of poetry, which sets out, within the limits of its metrical framework, to state something beautiful. Darwin describes nature very well; he is interested in what he sees, and describes it very carefully, but he is also interested in what it means; not only in how beautiful it is, but how it came to be what it is today. For me, Darwin (in The Voyage of the Beagle) conveys the magic of landscapes, as well as awakening my curiosity. He demonstrates for me that a scientific interest need not eliminate an awareness of beauty and ugliness. But my reading of The Old Ways is that it is fundamentally an exercise in the beautiful: despite references to the modern world, it is fundamentally about a mythical countryside that no longer exists, and probably never existed. 

I don’t find the people, and many of the places, mentioned by Macfarlane stir my curiosity to discover more. One figure, that of Edward Thomas, however, is central to the whole book. 

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is an unlikely hero to be selected by an arts professor. On the very slim evidence provided by the book, the verse is not great: 

Whatever the roads bring

To me or take from me,

They keep me company

With their pattering,

 

Crowding the solitude

Of the loops over the downs,

Hushing the roar of towns

And their brief multitude.

 

The author and his attitudes

Macfarlane is very coy about himself. There is no biography for him in the paperback edition I read (published 2013). His Wikipedia entry, and references to him on his books, state simply he is a Fellow. The website for Emmanuel College Cambridge states he is Professor of Environmental Humanities, which sounds to me unique (although Fiona Stafford, despite being a professor of literature, in The Long, Long Life of Trees has compiled what in some ways is a a similar miscellany that comprises mentions of every English and American author, it seems, who has mentioned a specific tree variety). 

I am not happy about Macfarlane's macho attitude to nature. A walk cannot simply be a walk; it has to be life-threatening in some way. His walk to Foulness Island is full of tales of how dangerous the walk is, how many people have gone missing. If it is so dangerous, why does he feel the need to walk it, especially since there is a perfectly sound road for vehicles he could use? When he walks the Icknield way, he starts by cycling frantically, falls off and breaks a rib or two. But he carries on walking. Why? Who is he trying to impress? He walks for over ten hours, damages his feet, and sleeps outdoors. Should we be impressed? Are we admiring nature or Mr Macfarlane’s exploits? On a boat trip near the Hebrides, he sails at night in a boat that has no lights. In Spain he falls asleep on a mountain ledge and then notices that vultures are hovering overhead. Is this clever? 

Only on page 363, the penultimate page of the book, do we discover that Macfarlane has children: “Suddenly I feel a tidal pull homewards, to my own children, wanting to keep them safe against harm and time.” This is rather abrupt, given that the rest of the book depicts an author alone, a man who wants to sleep outside by himself (more than once he sleeps by himself in the “wild” rather than sharing accommodation with the others in his party).  The author seems almost to admire that Thomas walked away from his own family and children in World War One when, at the age of 36, he enlisted, although he was not obliged to join the armed forces. 

Cruelty

Macfarlane describes cruelty without comment, which suggests some kind of acceptance. He seems to have no problem with the barbaric practice on the remote Scottish island of Sula Sgeir of killing gannets. Two thousand birds are killed each year, and the wings tossed aside and left on the island. From Wikipedia [“Sula Sgeir”]:   

The Sula Sgeir hunt, which would otherwise be illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, receives an annual licence from the government, which allows it to continue … The Scottish SPCA describes it as "barbaric and inhumane" and believes it causes unnecessary suffering to the birds, with many taking several blows to be killed. 

Neither does Macfarlane condemn the peculiar Steve Dilworth, in the chapter Gneiss, who collects human and animal skeletons and decaying corpses. 

When he [Dilworth] was a student in art college he’d taken an air rifle into the life-drawing class, sat by an open window that overlooked a stand of trees, and shot any squirrels that appeared. [p177] 

I don’t imagine this charming activity improved the quality of his own or of his fellow students’ life drawings. 

Macfarlane and alcohol

The author makes it clear he enjoys drinking – nothing wrong with that. But there are worrying references to a culture of drinking. “Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other.” [p171]. In the episode described above where he sees a vulture circling overhead, he continues: “I sat upright, making vigorous signs of life and freedom, and it veered away. I didn’t need any help damaging my liver.” 

Macfarlane the traditionalist

Ships are always “she”. Weights and measures are given in imperial units. There is an emphasis on British writers, artists and poets. Three-quarters of the book is set in England and Scotland; the remaining chapters are set “abroad”. 

Lack of specificity

There are so many references to places and to walks in this book, but not a single map. I start to think that the references to places, using wherever possible local names, are a tool for surrounding the subject with mystery. Macfarlane’s preference is for walks where there is no map; where you get instructions from someone you meet, who tells you vaguely where to go. It seems to be somehow more exciting when you don’t know exactly where the path is.    

For a book about paths and walking, The Old Ways is very lacking in signposts. Chapters are given a cryptic title that does not indicate their contents. Chapter 3 is “Chalk”, while Chapter 14, also set on chalk downs, is called “Flint”. Chapter 11 is “Roots”, yet is no more or less about roots than the other chapters.

Conclusion

I love walking and I love nature. Sadly, I do not recognize the nature or the attitudes described in this book. If Robert Macfarlane invited me to join him on a walk, I don’t think I would want to join him. For him, nature is there to provide danger, but to be conquered, either alone or (mostly) in the company of other males. The Old Ways seems to me to be traditionally male in its attitudes, and they are not traditions I am particularly interested to share.