Author(s): Robert Macfarlane

Essays & Letters

Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it. Praise for The Old Ways: "A magnificent meditation on walking and writing. An astonishingly haunted book' Adam Nicolson, Daily Telegraph 'Sets the imagination tingling ...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems". (John Carey, Sunday Times). "A wonderful book. He has a poet's eye and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy". (John Banville, Observer). Robert Macfarlane won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book, Mountains of the Mind. His second, The Wild Places, won three prizes and was adapted for the BBC. The Old Ways was joint winner of the Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, and shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and eight other awards. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.