An especially tender chapter recounts a ritual walk Macfarlane took across Scotland’s Cairngorm massif to attend his grandfather’s funeral. Macfarlane’s grandfather, a diplomat and mountaineer, instilled in him a love of roaming.
In this way the path of a raindrop hundreds of thousands of years ago may determine the route of a modern-day walker.”
Those pathways in turn pull in pedestrians, “all of whom etch the track of their passage with their feet as they go.
Macfarlane is likewise fascinated by what geologists have termed “preferential pathways,” grooves carved by the solvent action of water on limestone. In one such passage, he notes the power of what urban planners call “desire lines,” in which one person’s impulsive shortcut encourages others to follow, creating informal, unmapped channels through a city. He wears his polymath intelligence lightly as his mind roams across geology, archaeology, fauna, flora, architecture, art, literature and urban design, retrieving small surprises everywhere he walks. To describe Macfarlane as a philosopher of walking is to undersell the achievement of “The Old Ways”: his prose feels so firmly grounded, resistant to abstraction. Topographically and emotionally, his loosely assembled collection of walks is centered on two heartlands: southern England’s soft chalk downs and the unyielding Scottish north. “The Old Ways” takes us to some far-flung places - Buddhist trails in the eastern Himalayas, Spain’s Camino de Santiago, the occupied Palestinian territories - but mostly Macfarlane stays closer to home. The youngest of these figures, Macfarlane is the author of four works of nonfiction, most recently and triumphantly, “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot,” an iconoclastic blend of natural history, travel writing and much more. Since the millennium, however, travel writing has become a dwindling force as digital access has eroded the exotic - while British natural history writing has soared, bringing commercial and critical success to writers like Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin. Jonathan Raban, Redmond O’Hanlon, Pico Iyer, Sara Wheeler and the Norfolk-based Iowan, Bill Bryson, all advanced that revival. In 1977, Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Time of Gifts” prompted a renaissance in British travel writing, which for 20 years would remain as pre-eminent in the United Kingdom as the memoir was in the United States.
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