Reading: The Wild Places
Dec. 2nd, 2018 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI bought a copy of Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places in the Highland Bookshop in Fort William, mostly on the strength of there being a chapter about Rannoch Moor which I'd crossed on foot three days earlier, and I picked it up to read last week out of a longing for hills and open spaces instead of streets and houses and the flatness of the Thames Valley.
The Wild Places is MacFarlane's quest for what remains of the wild in built-up 21st century Britain and Ireland. From a beechwood near his Cambridge home, too close to civilisation to fulfil the desire for wildness, he sets off on a series of journeys: to Ynys Enlli, off the coast of North Wales; to Coruisk on Skye; to Rannoch Moor, Cape Wrath, and the Burren in the west of Ireland, seeking wildness beyond the reach of human influence. What he finds, instead, is wild lands with a long and complicated relationship with their human inhabitants, both influenced by and influencing them, and as he moves closer to home, visiting a Dorset holloway, the lonely shingle spits and saltmarshes of East Anglia, he finds a new definition of wildness; not something grand and lonely, but a smaller, more quotidian quality found in the range of places where the natural world has touched people's lives, and an underlying force that will reclaim the land after humans have disappeared. In a journey which is ultimately circular, or maybe a spiral, he returns to the Cambridge beechwood where his outward travels have enabled him, in the words of the passage from Four Quartets which open the final chapter, "to know the place for the first time".
The book is a wonderful mix of fabulously lyrical descriptions of the beauty that can still be found across the British Isles, scientific explanations of natural phenomena, a philosophical meditation on the nature of wildness and the relationship of humans with the world around us and a tribute to Macfarlane's friend and mentor Roger Deakin, who accompanied him on several of the journeys and whose sudden and untimely death is one of the book's pivots. I loved reading this, and will probably re-read it sooner rather than later.
The Wild Places is MacFarlane's quest for what remains of the wild in built-up 21st century Britain and Ireland. From a beechwood near his Cambridge home, too close to civilisation to fulfil the desire for wildness, he sets off on a series of journeys: to Ynys Enlli, off the coast of North Wales; to Coruisk on Skye; to Rannoch Moor, Cape Wrath, and the Burren in the west of Ireland, seeking wildness beyond the reach of human influence. What he finds, instead, is wild lands with a long and complicated relationship with their human inhabitants, both influenced by and influencing them, and as he moves closer to home, visiting a Dorset holloway, the lonely shingle spits and saltmarshes of East Anglia, he finds a new definition of wildness; not something grand and lonely, but a smaller, more quotidian quality found in the range of places where the natural world has touched people's lives, and an underlying force that will reclaim the land after humans have disappeared. In a journey which is ultimately circular, or maybe a spiral, he returns to the Cambridge beechwood where his outward travels have enabled him, in the words of the passage from Four Quartets which open the final chapter, "to know the place for the first time".
The book is a wonderful mix of fabulously lyrical descriptions of the beauty that can still be found across the British Isles, scientific explanations of natural phenomena, a philosophical meditation on the nature of wildness and the relationship of humans with the world around us and a tribute to Macfarlane's friend and mentor Roger Deakin, who accompanied him on several of the journeys and whose sudden and untimely death is one of the book's pivots. I loved reading this, and will probably re-read it sooner rather than later.
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Date: 2018-12-02 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 10:07 pm (UTC)