I suspect that this was a disservice to a book that deserved all of my mind’s attention on each word of exquisite prose. For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes): Macfarlane The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes): Macfarlane
On boggy areas of Dartmoor, fragments of white china clay were placed to show safe paths at twilight, like Hansel and Gretel’s pebble trail.It's bad luck for Robert Macfarlane that I read his book immediately after The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, which is characterized by its purity and depth.
The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot - Google Books The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot - Google Books
According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain.
The walking of paths is, to him, an education, and symbolic, too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing, wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and behind. And it is an affirmation of their connectedness as part of a great network linking ways and wayfarers of every sort.
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Joined in 2023 
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