'...there are kinds of knowing that only feet can enable, as there are memories of a place that only feet can recall...'
I can only imagine that if this book is of little interest to you, then you may just have heaved a big *sigh* and thought ' Oh no not that again,' and if that is the case you have my everso humble apologies ... and you might want to stride out on your journey around the blogosphere right now.
For those of you who have stayed a bit longer, thank you, it is publication day this week so time to share my thoughts on The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, and wave the book on its way as it starts its own big journey, walking off into the world.
Team Old Ways have been fortunate enough to have been reading this for months now, and me even longer, but I knew the minute I laid eyes on it and read this in the introduction, that this would be a special book for me and hopefully many others...
'...an exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt ancient paths, of the tales that tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and trespass, of songlines and their singers and of the starnge continents that exist within countries.'
And I immediately thought of Maggie Pearly lane.
Maggie Pearly lane (and who knows if it is spelt Purly, Purley, Purlie, Pearlie... because this is oral history a la Devon) is one of the many green lanes that I walk in these parts of the Shire. I only know of its name because it is in the Gamekeeper's patch and he knows
everything...except only the bare 'facts'. That Maggie lived locally and hanged herself somewhere along this lane is the lore, and of course her ghost walks up and down it...as do I, and it would seem Maggie always wreaks her revenge on my shoes.
I will find out more one day.
But The Old Ways has all made me think more keenly about my feet inside those shoes too...
'The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space - have already folded and creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world..'
And I think about a baby's foot and that primitive Babinski reflex it holds for the first year or so of life. If you stroke the sole of a baby's foot from the toes down watch those tiny toes spread out...it's heart-melting magic.
I am now on my second and much slower read of The Old Ways and unlocking more secrets of a book that I know will have a permanent shelf-life here.
The first read had all the anticipation of an unknown journey...
Where would we going next...
What would we be seeing...
Who might we meet...
What might go wrong...
And I tagged along a bit like a very keen puppy, embracing Robert's own description of his journey in writing this book...
'the traveller's usual mix of excitement, incompetence,... adventure and epiphany...'
as his chapter titles took me to Chalk, Silt, Water South and North, Peat, Gneiss, Granite, Limestone and more via Track and Path.
It is the second read (still in progress) which feels much more like a sojourn, taking time to soak up the writing, which feels beautifully supple and absorbing, and of the step-into-these-boots-and-know-this-for-yourself variety. You may not have come across this genre before, but it is the best way I can think of to describe the routes various offered to the reader to draw them into the journey. When the skylarks 'pelted' their song down, and the light 'pearled' on the barley to a backdrop of hawthorn hedges which 'foamed whilst the wood pigeons 'clattered', well I knew where I was.
Likewise I recognised the starlings 'making their car-alarm trills, their aerosol can rattles and their camera-shutter clicks' because this is not all idyllic Arcadian nostalgia and sentimental wandering, time frequently collapses in on itself and the modern landscape edges its way in via fly-tipped rubbish blocking gateways, adding yet another layer of geological complexity.
I can see it now... the fossil hunter in a zillion years time finding the preserved vacuum cleaner 'whose transparent body was filled with black flies' and whisking it straight off to the Natural History Museum, which will probably still be standing, and where they will hold a special exhibition of King Tut proportions probably to be called The Dyson Era or something.
And this has also brought to my attention the beauty of the geological map of the British Isles, not something I could even have feigned interest in before now.
Robert likens it to the intricate marbling of a Victorian endpaper and indeed the book utilises that by using the map on its own endpapers. But when I try to get my head around the idea that the chalk in that green corner of the south east was laid down on the seabed at the rate of about 1mm per century over a period of about 35 million years and now just look at it...
...well I can't quite get my head around the scale of all that. yet when I am out walking now I can somehow shrink it right back down to Edward Thomas's vision of
'path as story, with each new walker adding a new note or plot-line along the way.'
With my interest in geology, and what may lie beneath my feet now picqued I discovered a forgotten copy of Richard Fortey's book The Hidden Landscape on the shelf. By the time you read this (DV etc) we will be in Orkney sampling... well more of the same actually, the identical Devonian sandstone geology as home if you look at the map carefully, the country top and tailed in rusty orange ochre, and you can be sure I will have been conducting Did You Know Pleistocene seminars as we traversed the Great Glen from Fort William to Inverness en route.
There are also some clever little nuances in The Old Ways that had completely passed me by in my rush to reach the destination first time around, but I'll tell you about those tomorrow...
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