The Old Ways completes Robert Macfarlane’s trilogy about the British landscape, the earlier (and excellent) books being The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. As in those books, nature is a major player in The Old Ways, along with the people that Macfarlane meets in the places he visits. The ‘old ways’ are not only footpaths; sea roads too find a place, as he sails in an open boat, the old way, with knowledgeable guides. The footpaths, too, are not only in Britain: there is a marvellous pair of chapters on the poet Edward Thomas, ‘Flint’ and ‘Ghost’, as Macfarlane tracks him across the South Downs, and then to Thomas’s death as an artillery officer on the first day of the Battle of Arras, poignantly described with “The morning is a triumph for the British batteries”. Yes, we think; but was it worth the loss of one poet’s life, thousands of other lives. This is fine writing, not escapism, nor yet history, but a walking meditation that encompasses human life past and present, situated in the natural and human world with all its elements—social, political, emotional, spiritual.

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