Robert Macfarlane: The Old Ways

‘I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place…’

And so Robert Macfarlane’s journey proceeds, on foot, in words, through time, territory and collective memory. He and I have quite often followed the same tracks, in the wake of others who have recorded the mind in movement; and for me the ghosts of Chatwin, Deakin, and Sebald travel still.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin 2012)