The Wild Places

In The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane embarks on a series of beautifully described journeys in the remaining wildernesses of Britain and Ireland. The result is both an intellectual and a physical journey, with the author travelling in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild.From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places.His journeys take him through some of the most remarkable landscapes of the British
Isles. He climbs, walks and swims through these places in rainstorm, sunshine and blizzard, by darkness and by day. He spends nights sleeping out on cliff-tops and remote beaches, deep in snowy woods, on pilgrim islands, mountain summits, and ancient meadows. He bathes in phosphorescent seas, walks frozen rivers at night, and watches a red sun rise over Arctic England.Certain birds, animals, trees and objects - snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones - recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter.At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, ”The Wild Places” is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is
concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance. In the course of his journeys, Macfarlane’s own understanding of wildness undergoes a transformation.This is Macfarlane’s second book, following his prize-winning debut ”Mountains of the Mind”. He has established himself as a writer of both lyrical elegance and precision; he has also acquired a reputation as a passionate and acute observer of the natural world.