David Craig writes:

Robert Macfarlane is a literary scholar who has spent many hundreds of hours walking in England and the Scottish Highlands, in Spain, Palestine and Tibet. His aim here is to describe some of his most memorable explorations by way of ‘pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets’, to say nothing of ‘holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways’. Macfarlane’s best passages are finely achieved. His chapter about walking through the shallow sea off Norfolk richly evokes the silt between the toes, the disorienting sense of being without bearings on a great plain of shimmer and ripple.

(LRB 20 December 2012)

Hamish Hamilton | Hardback 448 pp. |ISBN: 9780241143810