The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
Read The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Online
Authors: Robert Macfarlane
ROBERT MACFARLANE
The Old Ways
A Journey on Foot
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
HAMISH HAMILTON
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2012
Copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photograph © Richard Long, All Rights Reserved, DACS, 2011. Cover design © gray318
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-24-114553-1
Table of Contents
1 Track
2 Path
3 Chalk
4 Silt
PART II FOLLOWING ( Scotland )
5 Water – South
6 Water – North
7 Peat
8 Gneiss
9 Granite
10 Limestone
11 Roots
12 Ice
13 Snow
14 Flint
15 Ghost
16 Print
Contents
Author’s Note
PART I TRACKING
(
England
)
1 Track
2 Path
3 Chalk
4 Silt
PART II FOLLOWING
(
Scotland
)
5 Water – South
6 Water – North
7 Peat
8 Gneiss
9 Granite
PART III ROAMING
(
Abroad
)
10 Limestone
11 Roots
12 Ice
PART IV HOMING
(
England
)
13 Snow
14 Flint
15 Ghost
16 Print
Glossary
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
By the same author
Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination
The Wild Places
For Julia, Lily and Tom, and those who keep the paths open
Much has been written
of travel, far less of the road.
Edward Thomas, The Icknield Way (1913)
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (1977)
PART I
Tracking (England)
Track
All things are engaged
in writing their history … Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850)
Two days short of the winter solstice; the turn of the year’s tide. All that cold day, the city and the countryside around felt halted, paused. Five degrees below freezing and the earth battened down. Clouds held snow that would not fall. Out in the suburbs the schools were closed, people homebound, the pavements rinky and the roads black-iced. The sun ran a shallow arc across the sky. Then just before dusk the snow came – dropping straight for five hours and settling at a steady inch an hour.
I was at my desk that evening, trying to work but distracted by the weather. I kept stopping, standing, looking out of the window. The snow was sinking through the orange cone cast by a street light, the fat flakes showing like furnace sparks.
Around eight o’clock the snow ceased. An hour later I went for a walk with a flask of whisky to keep me warm. I walked for half a mile along dark back roads where the snow lay clean and unmarked. The houses began to thin out. A few undrawn curtains: family evenings underway, the flicker and burble of television sets. The cold like a wire in the nose. A slew of stars, the moon flooding everything with silver.
At the southerly fringe of the suburb, a last lamp post stands by a hawthorn hedge, and next to it is a hole in the hedge which leads down to a modest field path.
I followed the field path east-south-east towards a long chalk hilltop, visible as a whaleback in the darkness. Northwards was the glow of the city, and the red blip of aircraft warning lights from towers and cranes. Dry snow squeaked underfoot. A fox crossed the field to my west at a trot. The moonlight was so bright that everything cast a crisp moon-shadow: black on white, stark as woodcut. Wands of dogwood made zebra-hide of the path; hawthorn threw a lattice. The trees were frilled with snow, which lay to the depth of an inch or more on branches and twigs. The snow caused everything to exceed itself and the moonlight caused everything to double itself.
This is the path I’ve probably walked more often than any other in my life. It’s a young way; maybe fifty years old, no more. Its easterly hedge is mostly hawthorn and around eight feet high; its westerly hedge is a younger mix of blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel and dogwood. It is not normally a beautiful place, but there’s a feeling of secrecy to it that I appreciate, hedged in as it is on both sides, and running discreetly as it does between field and road. In summer I’ve seen small rolling clouds of goldfinches rising from teasel-heads and then curling ahead to settle again, retreating in the measure that I approach them.
That evening the path was a grey snow alley, and I followed it up to the
hanger
of beech trees that tops the whaleback hill, passing off the clay and onto the chalk proper. At the back brink of the beech wood I ducked through an ivy-trailed gap, and was into the forty-acre field that lies beyond.
At first sight the field seemed flawless;
floe
country. Then I set out across it and started to see the signs. The snow was densely printed with the tracks of birds and animals – archives of the hundreds of journeys made since the snow had stopped. There were neat deer
slots
, partridge prints like arrowheads pointing the way, and the pads of rabbits. Lines of tracks curved away from me across the field, disappearing into shadow or hedge. The moonlight, falling at a slant, deepened the dark in the nearer tracks so that they appeared full as inkwells. To all these marks I added my own.
The snow was overwhelmingly legible. Each print-trail seemed like a plot that could be read backwards in time; a series of allusions to events since ended. I found a line of fox pugs, which here and there had been swept across by the fox’s brush, as if it had been trying to erase evidence of its own passage. I discovered what I supposed were the traces of a pheasant taking off: trenched footprints where it had pushed up, then spaced feather-presses either side of the tracks, becoming progressively lighter and then vanishing altogether.