The Wild Places
By Robert Macfarlane
(340 pages, nature/travel, 2007)
Robert Macfarlane lives in England, and he sets out on a journey to see if wild places still exist in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. He starts off in a beechwood near his home and travels to islands, rivers, moors, mountains, beaches, holloways and more. There’s a map in the front of the book with the places that he traveled and pictures of small stones and objects he collects on the way. Things for his “storm-beach” to remind him of each place.
Macfarlane writes of the histories of each place, some of them tragic, and tells of naturalists and others, and their views of the wild. Many of them sought out wild places for comfort and solace and found healing in nature.
I liked his description of swimming in water with phosphorescence, a phenomenon that makes his limbs glow with different colored lights. He could fling drops of color as if he were a sorcerer. He hikes up mountains, climbs trees, sleeps under uprooted tree roots during a snowstorm, and lies on a beach at night, listening to the geese as they fly over him.
His writing is rich and wonderful. In almost every chapter I had stop and look up a word – gryke, holloway, corrie and curragh. From the first page I was fascinated by his use of language. He describes the sound of the wind in the trees as “a soft marine roar. It was the immense compound noise of friction – of leaf fretting on leaf, and branch rubbing on branch.” And in the River-mouth chapter he writes of an otter. “At one point, we disturbed an otter, which loped and skittered away over the rocks, then poured itself into the brown water, where it was instantly invisible.”
Macfarlane sees rare snow hares on a tor, and then finally circles home, visiting the beechwood again. He realizes that he is more aware of wildness around him. He can see wildness in the hedgerows, in the busy lives of insects in a rotten ash trunk, and in the sunlight as he walks in “a kaleidoscope wood.”
We need to connect with wild places more than ever, Robert Macfarlane – historian, traveler and naturalist takes us on a journey full of marvels in this powerful book.
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Robbin Bailey
