Product Description

The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels 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. 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, it 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #329 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Binding: Hardcover
• 340 pages

The Sunday Times
"... a descriptive writer of breathtaking power"

Scotsman
"Nature is a passion that Robert Macfarlane puts beautifully into words ... one of the finest nature writers in Britain"

Guardian
"The Wild Places is a book that inhales the zeitgeist, as well as the fresh air of open country"

Customer Reviews

A book to savour - poetic, reflective and precise
This book really imaginatively engaged me and brought to life the wildness of many of the landscapes of the United Kingdom. Macfarlane's precise writing evokes these places so well - the weather, plants, minerals, animal life and people. He also has the uncanny knack of bringing in his reading in English literature, nature writing , history and science in ways that seem entirely right and never forced. Casting a moving shadow over the book is the death of a friend, which also helps make this so much more than a travelogue.

Best ever
I think this book is the most enjoyable I have read in my 89 years. Irs word pictures and linked thoughts are superb.

rootless
This collection of essays is not in the same league as the wonderful 'Mountains of the Mind'. The writing is often sharp and lyrical, and Macfarlane frequently makes unexpected connections with ideas and writing that cause the reader to think in new ways.

However, there is a lingering sense of 'urban tourist' to my mind. Ironically, for a book which tries to examine place and belonging, there is a strange rootlesness that tends to look at the world in an almost colonial way. This is most obvious in the sections which deal with Scotland, Ireland or Wales, all countries with combine a strong sense of 'place with indigenous literature and language. Macfarlane never really seems to get to grips with this, and seems to see these countries as variations of a type of 'Englishness' that are seen through the prism of the English literary canon. He makes little acknowledgement of the link between landscape and landscape (Gaelic (Scots and Irish) and Welsh) and the fact that there is a long cultural tradition that predates and has a very different worldview from that of the Romantic poets who 'discovered' and idealised wild landscape.

In summary, this is an interesting but flawed collection of essays.