According to Macfarlane, Thomas misread the poem as “a parody of his indecisiveness over the question of the war.” Thomas enlisted, and died on a World War I battlefield in France. These inspired the famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” which Frost sent Thomas in draft. In 1913 Thomas befriended Robert Frost, and they took what Frost called ‘talk-walkings’ together in Gloucester- shire. Its guiding spirit is the nature poet and essayist Edward Thomas. Today, the bird is a rare and costly delicacy, the hunt strictly controlled by quotas.Ī fellow at a Cambridge college, Macfarlane is a walker and a scholar, and his book is enhanced by historical and literary references. In a chapter about water, Macfarlane sails to Sula Sgeir, a desolate rocky outcropping north of the Hebrides, where resilient Scots have slaughtered gannets for food for centuries. Not all old ways are on land some are seaways. In Tibet he walks another pilgrim way, the stony, tortuous path followed by devout Buddhists to Minya Konka (24,790’): “I felt no desire at all to climb the mountain, glad only to have seen it … I made a pair of cairns.” It is the journey that counts. In Spain Macfarlane hikes a section of the Camino de Santiago. Macfarlane pays tribute to his late grandfather Edward Peck, a diplomat and mountain climber, who retired to the area: “… it was my grandfather who had helped high country and wild places to cast their strong spells over me.” (Reading this, I thought of another British diplo- mat and mountaineer, James Bryce, who inspired the 1910 formation of the GMC.) The granite chapter focuses on the Cairngorm Mountains in the Scottish Highlands. The Broomway is often wrapped in fog over the centuries countless walkers have drowned, caught by an incoming tide. The silty path is the perilous Broomway, an ancient public right of way on the Essex coast of England, in the past marked by bundles of sticks, hence the name. He is an engaging and curious companion: you never know what will catch his eye, although geology and flora and fauna are high on his list.Ĭhapter headings reflect the surfaces he traverses: silt, peat, gneiss, ice, limestone, granite. Macfarlane has his feet on the ground as he follows ancient walking paths in England, Scotland, Palestine, Spain and Tibet. This elegantly written book by Robert Macfarlane is about “how people understand themselves using landscape.” Or put another way, how “we are shaped by the landscape through which we move.” Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin Books, New York, 2012).
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