by Robert MacFarlane

I am busy reading up on the concept of mindfulness, with a view to trying to incorporate some into my own life, when I am asked to review Robert MacFarlane’s third book.  I break off from my Buddhist meanderings somewhat reluctantly, but with respect to MacFarlane, whose first two books, Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, I loved.

With MacFarlane’s opening words I am at once both transported with him on his journeying, and brought to a giddy halt within my own ruminations, for his writing incorporates the essence of mindfulness, whilst also managing to record its opposite. If mindfulness is all about staying in the moment, then MacFarlane achieves just that, with his sharp-focus descriptions of walking through landscape both wild and tamed, remote and skirting urbanity. His brilliance lies, I think, in the fact that he really does these walks, really does sleep under hedges and between rocks, with stars overhead. As he says himself, this book has not been written by sitting still, proof of which burgeons through the intimacy of every phrase, every minute detail of description. His gift is to enable the reader to see and smell the land through which he traverses, breathe in the air, touch the earth, shiver with the cold or bask in the sun.

Yet the opposite is also true of MacFarlane’s writing, as his very reason for walking a drove road, or sailing a sea lane, or seeking a Tibetan pilgrimage route,  or following 5000 year old footsteps along a coastline is to research their histories, to peer into the past with some kind of historical mindfulness, if you will. As he follows old paths through English chalk, silt and snow, Scottish water, peat and granite, Palestinian limestone, Spanish forest and Tibetan ice, MacFarlane tells stories of the people who made these paths and why. He recounts old tales of honour, tragedy, beauty, necessity, endeavour. He introduces characters both past and present, who use or have used these paths and he explores the whys and wherefores of their use. A trading route for one generation may become a place of solace for a melancholy poet in another.  A still-used sea route will have been known by both 5^th century devouts seeking extreme solitude and Mesolithic hunters seeking seabird meat. Along any path can be met artists, writers, naturalists, but also the homeless, the desperate and the dispossessed. 

In the act of writing about his journeys following these routes either with friends or folk he meets, MacFarlane is of course setting down his own layer of history and of stories. Through the rich tapestry of history he is weaving his own thread. Walking and writing, journeys as stories and stories as journeys: there is a strong tradition and connection between walking and creativity. 

In this series of essays MacFarlane brilliantly evokes life on the old ways, intricately woven with story, wisdom, philosophy, spirituality, history, geology and, yes, mindfulness. I feel honoured to have read his words, to have been ‘with’ him on his journeys, and to have vicariously met, through these pages, so many astonishing people.

©Julia Welstead 2012