The Wild Places Book

The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks questers scientists philosophers poets and artists both living and dead he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath to the holloways of Dorset the storm-beaches of Norfolk the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures past and present who have had intense relationships with these places.Certain birds animals trees and objects - snow-hares falcons beeches crows suns white stones - recur and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage an adventure story an exercise in visionary cartography and a work of natural history it is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship and of a loss. It mixes history memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.