This Week I am Reading ... Ms Grace Shuck
Ms Grace Shuck is an Early Years Assistant at Elmfield. Grace shares her review of The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane below.
This week I am reading ‘The Old Ways – A Journey on Foot’, by Robert Macfarlane. Published in 2012, it is one of three stand-alone works, described by the author as ‘the third in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart’.
After looking online last year for inspiration on fiction I might enjoy, my existing reading preferences directed me towards the ‘Landmarks’ book by the same author. Having wanted a departure from my usual favoured non-fiction choices, I resisted buying it until I happened upon both books during a summer walk around Ironbridge. The books have been sitting on my bedside table for a couple of weeks now, and offered the promise of escape into a rejuvenating natural landscape as I took a tour through more artificial terrain with my last book, ‘The Disconnect – A Personal Journey Through the Internet’, by Roisin Kiberd. Read in this context, I was reminded of how much enjoyment I experience through becoming more in-sync with nature during walking holidays. In a world where modern technology allows us to live a 24/7 lifestyle, there is a satisfying reassurance that comes from being constrained by nature, be it in having the site of one’s tent pitch dictated by the fading light, in waking with the rising sun, or even arguably in having a trip cut short because of stormy weather.
On starting the book, I soon learned Macfarlane resists accounts of walking as a means of retreat or escape. Instead he highlights the relationships between people and place, offering an expansive view of walking as enabling ‘sight and thought’, with ‘paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing’. He shares the words of W.H.Hudson, an author and old-way wanderer, in claiming walking such paths might lead you to ‘slip back out of this modern world’.
Macfarlane’s seemingly endless vocabulary of nature terms weaves together tales of personal travel and references to geography, history, literature, politics, metaphysics, myth and more, crafting a work filled with beautiful imagery, which hints at the boundlessness of nature. This theme is reflected in Macfarlane’s observations about how small islands have inspired dreams of total knowledge in those who love them, only for them to later realise how delusional they have been in not recognising sooner that familiarity with a place will lead not to absolute knowledge but only to further enquiry. I will carry this and many more ideas from the book on my future travels, and they will be richer experiences because of it.