The Wild Places

by Robert Macfarlane

Overview

“An eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we’re laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth’s surface.”
—Bill McKibben

Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago’s most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance. A unique travelogue that will intrigue readers of natural history and adventure, The Wild Places solidifies Macfarlane’s reputation as a young writer to watch.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440638657
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/24/2008
Series:	Landscapes , #2
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Macfarlane is the author of  prizewinning books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland . He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Editorial Reviews

The Wild Places boldly celebrates places that aren't supposed to exist, and does so in prose that is at times very nearly as vivid and beautiful as the thing itself.

Rebecca Solnit

Prose as precise as this is not just evocative. It is a manifesto in itself. Macfarlane's language urges us to gaze more closely at the wonders around us, to take notice, to remind ourselves how thrillingly alive a spell in the wild can make us seem.

Sunday Times (UK)

Award-wining Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind, 2003) celebrates Great Britain's remaining wilderness. Setting out from his home in Cambridge to explore the forests, mountains and rivers of his native land, the author was inspired by the Scottish explorer and mountain climber W.H. Murray (1913-96). The Glasgow-born Murray sustained himself during three years in World War II prison camps by writing about beloved wild places on sheets of toilet paper that eventually became the book Mountaineering in Scotland. Following Murray's admonition that "secret things awaited inquiry," Macfarlane explored varied areas. He visited the remote and serene island of Ynys Enlli in North Wales, once home to generations of Christian monks and still a refuge for hundreds of species of migrating birds. He trod the deeply worn holloways, or sunken roads, cut into the Dorset countryside by cartwheels and hooves over the centuries. He investigated the Burren region of northern County Clare, Ireland, a landscape of limestone graced with both hardy plants and funerary monuments dating back thousands of years. A keen observer and accomplished writer, Macfarlane does a splendid job of conveying the look and feel of these wild places and draws on wide reading in science and literature to anchor them in nature and the imagination. He encountered the "disinterest" of a mountain, Ben Hope, on a cold winter night; loch-filled valleys forming sanctuaries where time was expressed in shades and textures; and the "wilding quality" of darkness in the Cumbrian mountains. "Wildness weaved with the human world," he came to realize, "rather than existing only in cleaved-off areas." For all the loss of nature in densely populatedBritain, it remained resurgent and irrepressible in the most unexpected places. "The sheer force of ongoing organic existence," Macfarlane writes, can be found on a tiny woodland at the city's edge or on a mountaintop. Evocative and well-written, a delight for nature and travel buffs. Agent: Jessica Woollard/The Marsh Agency

Kirkus Reviews

A formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence – poetry really – with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach far transcend the physical region he explores . . . the natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane’s devoted observations.” – The New York Times Book Review
 
“Macfarlane delivers crisp, engaging scenes . . . by the end of his peregrinations he had won me over completely.” – Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe
 
“In this eloquent travelogue, Macfarlane explores the last undomesticated landscapes in Britain and Ireland in a narration that blends history, memoir, and meditation . . . His striking prose not only evokes each locale’s physicality in sensuous, deliberate detail, it glows with a reverence for nature in general and takes the reader on both a geographical and a philosophical journey.” – Publishers Weekly

"The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature'" — Scotland on Sunday (UK)

"Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow'"—Sunday Times (London)

"Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again" —Metro (London)

"He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful" —Antony Gormley, artist

From the Publisher