The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane

I have already read Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways but for some while have thought the it was particularly relevant to my body of work and so decided to read it again with the body of work in mind.  Nicholas Lezard tells us in The Guardian of 2 July 2013 that 15 authors made it their book of the year in 2012.  Lezard informs us that MacFarlane prefers the @the wilder and woolier environment' and his second book The Wild Places (blog link here) tried to get as close to wilderness as is possible in the UK.  MacFarlane is more interested in paths and passes rather than summits he tells us.  We are told that this is a book about walking including the paths of the sea - this I found especially interesting and pertinent coming, as I do, from a coastal environment.  Lezard continues 'It is illuminating to be told that before the Romans came, there was an extraordinary amount of sea traffic around the British Isles and Europe, which helps account for the remarkable genetic similarity of people from various coastal regions extending from Orkney to Spain. He helps us understand what it is to see the water as as criss-crossed by routes as the land, partly by describing what it feels like to sleep in an open boat where the only navigational aid is the Pole Star.' MacFarlane actually mentions in the book that it is a good idea to turn our mental map upside down and instead of thinking of the land as criss-crossed by roads, paths and tracks, invert the idea and populate the sea with paths and the land as empty.  The above then makes sense.  I find this fascinating, especially living on the edge of the major seaway of the Humber and to think of all the traders passing up and down the river reaching far inland, along the coast and across the North Sea.  I can sea links here not only with my body of work, but also with the project I completed on flotsam and jetsam for PWDP.  Opportunities are also opened up for developing my body of work and linking it to past work.
Lezard tells us that he particularly enjoyed the way that MacFarlane coined the word xenotopia to describe an uncanny landscape.  There are paths that are not paths but xenotopic places recalls the chapter on the Broomway a contingent path along tidal sands between Wakering Stairs and Foulness in Essex.  Said to be the most dangerous path in Britain, it vies for fame with that across the sands of Morecambe Bay.  This is also pertinent to my home environment with the tidal sands and mudflats of the Humber being equally etherial and dangerous.

Writing and walking are great companions says Lezard and reminds the reader of Iain Sinclair and Will Self deal with the topic of psychogeography.  He suggests that The Old Ways is a first-rate addition to the genre.

I particularly empathised with the idea of walking The Old Ways , ancient routes that go back into the historical and even prehistorical past.  Like MacFarlane I am sure these pathways carry memories and they are certainly Shuls (the title of my body of work).  I am salso taken by how in his other books as well as this, MacFarlane sleeps out on the trail and in the woods, something I have in the pipeline.  I have have spent my whole life from an early age camping but have always had the sliver of material between myself and the world, something I intend to address.  I am also taken with his penchant for experience his environment at night, something I have begun to do and also to try to record photographically.

This book also reminds me of a family favourite of ours The Dark is Rising sequence of books for older children/adults.  The Dark is Rising itself refers often to paths and trackways especially the 'Old Ways' and has been mentioned by MacFarlane on his Twitter feed.

Below are my highlighted notes from the book:-

• The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature - a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells. P.18
• The Sierra Club was founded in 1892, inspired by (John) Muir's convictions that the walker's bodily contact with the wild world benefited both the walker and world, and that 'going out.........was really going in'.  P.20
• Many references to landscape and memory.  Page 22 when writing about walking Holloways with Roger Deakin.
• Reference to Bill Brandt photographing the Pilgrim's Way in 1950.  Not especially known for his wilderness photography I have referenced him on several occasions for this aspect of his work and have a book The Land edited by and featuring him on Twentieth Century Landscape Photographs.  P.24
• To (Edward) Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to self.  My feelings exactly but how to record this photographically is my current challenge.  P.26
• In non-western cultures, the ideas of footfall as knowledge and walking as a mode of thinking are widespread, often operating in particular as a metaphor for recollection - history as a region one walks back into.  P.28
• These traces - which include place names, stories, songs and relics - are sometimes called by the Apache bike' goz'aa - 'footpints', 'tracks'.  To the Thcho people of north-western Canada, walking and knowing are barely divisible activities: their term for 'knowledge' and their term for 'footprint' can be used interchangeably.  A Tibetan Buddhist text from around 600 years ago uses the word shul to mean 'a mark that remains after that which has amde it has passed by': footprints are shul, a path is shul, and such impressions draw one backwards into awareness of past events.  Reference the title of my body of work also landscape and memory.  P.28
• Yet Richard Long - who once walked thirty-three miles a day for thirty-three days, from the Lizard in Cornwall to Dunnet Head in northern Scotland - signs off his letters with a red-ink stamp that shows the outline of two feet with eyes embedded in their soles, gazing out at the looker.  Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape; touch as sight - these are notions to which I can hold.  And me.P.29
• The journeys told here take their bearings from the distant past, but also from the debris and phenomena of the present, for this is often a double insistence of old landscapes: that they be read in the then but felt in the now.  The waymarkers of my walks were not only dolmens, tumuli and long barrows, but also last year's ash-leaf frails (brittle in the hand), last night's fox scat (rank in the nose), this minute's bird call (sharp in the ear), the pylon's lyric crackle and the crop sprayer's hiss.  P.33
• Chapter 5 discusses sea paths as previously mentioned.  I have written a not to myself on P.94: Link coastal pathways to BOW.  Coasts look outwards to seaways as well as inwards to ancient trackways.  Just inland from our coast is the ancient trackway of the Bluestone Heath Road now sadly a tarmacked road.
• One of the reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously.................  P.147
• Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro terrains of lichen and moss.  ref. my work on micro landscapes.  P155
• My note: Landscape and Memory and us - whole page!  P.193
• 'No hay camino, se hace camino al andar' - 'there is no road, the road is made by walking'. P.236
• Mostly Miguel talked about trees, introducing me to individual specimens as if to old friends............. Reference The Long View.  P.247
• Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum.  I prefer to think of the word as a noun with a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident.  P255
• ........and as I neared the city it felt like an allegorical journey: to have crossed a pine-forested mountain range on a series of ancient paths, sleeping out on the wayside, under a vulture-filled sky, and then to be entering on foot a walled medieval city seen first from a mountain summit, levitating from the baking plains. Describing a walk from Madrid to Segovia.  P.256
• 'What was it Kerouac said?' asked John just before we all headed to our tents. ' "Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears." '  P.275
• In the Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd describes the conversion in her relationship with mountains that she experienced in the course of her life. ..................Circumambulation came to replace summit-fever for Shepherd; plateau substituted for peak. 'I believe that I now understand,' she wrote in the last paragraph of the last chapter of her book, 'in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain.' Reference The Long View - walking to trees rather than bagging summits.  P.279
• The light and the path were Ravillious's signature combinations as an artist.  Research Ravillious and Nash.  P.297
• (Edward) Thomas loved the historical synchronicities of the chalk: the ancient path lines that were echoed in form by yesterday's plough furrows.  He liked the evidence of human mark-making and tampering over milenia - tumuli, long barrows, chalk-pits, dew ponds - testifying to a landscape that was commemorative, tending to the consecrated.  P.309
• Edward Thomas's 1916 poem 'Roads'. Read/Research Edward Thomas.  P.311
• Helen (Thomas) thrilled to the atavism of what she called 'the ancient ways', the sense of being connected by footfall to 'history and tradition'.  Thomas taught her how to walk differently: 'with her body, not only with her legs', feeling the landscape as she moved over it.  Landscape and memory.  P.312
• Thomas is often described as a poet of place, but the volatility of plave fascinated him more than its reliability.  P.324
• He's a collector, too, mostly of flowers and eggs.  Reference my egg collection made when I was a young boy 50-60 years ago!! ;-( P.334
• Song is vital to Thomas: he is involved almost from the start in the English folk-song revival led by Cecil Sharp.  P.237
• Connection of Thomas with Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken.  P.342
• How hard it is to erase a path. (even on the battlefield of Arras.  P.351

Lezard, N. (2013) The Old Ways; A Journey by Foot by Robert MacFarlane, The Guardian, [online] available from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/02/old-ways-robert-macfarlane-review [accessed 15.11.17]