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: #2263 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 340 pages

Review
Bill McKibben (Author of THE END OF NATURE) "This book is an eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface, even in a place as crowded and civilized as Britain. I found it one of the most oddly comforting books I've read in a long long time" Iain Sinclair "A driven and necessary account of the wild places of these islands, near or remote, as they can be located and possessed within ourselves: in good heart, in hungry intelligence. Rich, sinewy prose to set on the shelf alongside works by Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey, Tim Robinson" Rebecca Solnit "Robert Macfarlane's extraordinary first book took a stance against the conventionally heroic; his second as boldly celebrates places that aren't supposed to exist. And The Wild Places does so in prose that is at times very nearly as vivid and beautiful as the thing itself: in his sentences there are sudden clearings, shafts of light, unexpected crossroads of ideas, views opening into the distance, close-ups of important flora and fauna. The book strides along through places, histories and ideas with a distance-walker's gait and a nature lover's pauses" Jan Morris "A lovely book by a sublimely civilized writer - honest nourishment for the mind and true enhancement for the spirit" Will Self "A beautifully modulated call from the wild, that will ensorcell any urban prisoner wishing to break free"

Award-wining Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind, 2003) celebrates Great Britain's remaining wilderness.Setting out from his home in Cambridge to explore the forests, mountains and rivers of his native land, the author was inspired by the Scottish explorer and mountain climber W.H. Murray (1913 - 96). The Glasgow-born Murray sustained himself during three years in World War II prison camps by writing about beloved wild places on sheets of toilet paper that eventually became the book Mountaineering in Scotland. Following Murray's admonition that "secret things awaited inquiry," Macfarlane explored varied areas. He visited the remote and serene island of Ynys Enlli in North Wales, once home to generations of Christian monks and still a refuge for hundreds of species of migrating birds. He trod the deeply worn holloways, or sunken roads, cut into the Dorset countryside by cartwheels and hooves over the centuries. He investigated the Burren region of northern County Clare, Ireland, a landscape of limestone graced with both hardy plants and funerary monuments dating back thousands of years. A keen observer and accomplished writer, Macfarlane does a splendid job of conveying the look and feel of these wild places and draws on wide reading in science and literature to anchor them in nature and the imagination. He encountered the "disinterest" of a mountain, Ben Hope, on a cold winter night; loch-filled valleys forming sanctuaries where time was expressed in shades and textures; and the "wilding quality" of darkness in the Cumbrian mountains. "Wildness weaved with the human world," he came to realize, "rather than existing only in cleaved-off areas." For all the loss of nature in densely populated Britain, it remained resurgent and irrepressible in the most unexpected places. "The sheer force of ongoing organic existence," Macfarlane writes, can be found on a tiny woodland at the city's edge or on a mountaintop.Evocative and well-written, a delight for nature and travel buffs. (Kirkus Reviews)

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 superb evocation of wildness
This is a wonderful book, and beautifully written. It reads like poetry. The only book I can compare it to is the little gem of a book written by Nan Shepherd about the Cairngorm Mountains and published in 1977 - The Living Mountain. Sadly this seems to be out of print, which is tragic as it deserves to be a classic and is the nearest thing to poetry in prose I have ever read. Nan Shepherd was Professor of English at Aberdeen University and I met her when I was working there in the seventies. I fell in love with the Cairngorms, as she did, and spent many days walking in them and camping alone in the hills. I love their harsh grandeur and the sense of space and light and hugeness, the pure air, the white mountain hares, all the wildlife which you see so much better alone, and the pure water which tastes like light. If you can get a copy, read it! Robert Macfarlane captures the same sense of wonder at wildness. We need wildness, and it would be tragic if we came to treat the few remaining wild places as playgrounds for townies to exert their machismo and to show their ability to conquer and to dominate. The wild is food for the soul, and we destroy it at our peril.We must learn to live with it, not subdue it.

Disappointing...
I settled down with this book, expecting an enjoyable read. It should have been just my thing: wild places, the great outdoors, etc. But after an interesting digression about maps, in the first few pages, it was all downhill. Robert Macfarlane is po-faced and portentious; he takes himself very seriously indeed. His "honeyed prose" (London Review of Books) is actually rather turgid. Worst of all, I didn't see the landscape through his eyes; even as he is describing wild places, the cumulative effect is oddly claustrophobic. Instead of firing me to to go and see the places he visited, I just got more and more irritated.

Oh for God's sake!
It woud be churlish to say that Robert Macfarlane's writing is not beautifully crafted and I wish I had his vocabulary and skill with words, but that's about as far as it goes. Much of this book seems to me to be pompous and smug. I get the impression that landsacape is a stage that Macfarlane uses to show how clever and sensitive he is. Most of the chapters have a small percentage about the so called wild place and a huge amount of pseudo intellectual background. Why he can't he just go to these places without the need to read forty books beforehand and then tell us all about them? There's also this slightly sanctimonious and quasi spiritual tone throughout - very hard to put my finger on, but it irritates me - it reminds of the writing that fills the pages of Resurgance magazine; all rainbows and wonder. I just knew that at some point he'd talk about wildness in miniature - I could feel it coming - and sure enough he looks into a gryke... Doesn't he ever just want to say: 'For God's sake Roger (Deakin), stop swimming in your darn moat and do something less pretentious instead.'