Long live the weeds and the wilderness

The Wild Places
by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, with an artistic eye for wild and lonely places. He was a friend and follower of Roger Deakin, whose last book I reveiwed three weeks ago. Deakin swam in strange waters; Macfarlane sleeps — or spends the night — in unlikely places, such as tentless on the top of Ben Hope, northernmost high mountain in Britain, in a northerly hailstorm in winter. Both of them attempt the heroic task of conveying the genius loci of wild landscapes in words, with little help from pictures or maps.

Dr Macfarlane takes the reader to ‘wild places’ all over Great Britain, with a couple in Ireland: not just the obvious like Rannoch Moor, or the well-known like Coruisk on Skye, but many lesser wild places like the holloways, the sunken roads that ‘affright the ladies’ and ‘make timid horsemen shudder’ and form an underground network in Dorset. He describes them with love and verve, celebrating not only the places but others — poets, warriors, mapmakers, eccentrics, friends — who have loved them before, and making some surprising parallels with other ages and other parts of the world. Whether words without pictures would mean anything to a reader who had not already some experience of similar places I find hard to say.

Wild places are not just vast and remote. From my Cambridge home, as Dr Macfarlane from his, I am five minutes’ walk from a wild place: a riverine wood with towering alders, collapsed willows, butterbur (recorded by John Ray in 1660), marsh woundwort, otters. In Kyoto, a much bigger city, one walks from the formal majesty of temples and shrines, through the little streets of human-scale Japan, then a penumbra of shabby modern buildings, and in ten minutes is in a forest that gives the illusion of endless wildland, trodden by no human foot for 150 years.