Paths relate, in several senses: they join place to place, and people to people. And they also keep and tell stories.
—Dr Robert Macfarlane
Few paths go straight for long. Look at the public rights of way marked on an Ordnance Survey map and you’ll notice all manner of kinks and dog-legs in the green dotted lines. It’s only when you walk those same paths that the wiggles on the map make perfect sense: they avoid the boggy bits, skirt the deep woods, and cross the stream at the shallowest point where the stepping stones stand bold of the dancing water. The oldest paths were made to get from A to B, connecting places for living, working, meeting and worshipping. The feet that made them had a sense of purpose that took the smoothest, safest way, following the contours of the landscape with an elegant economy.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Hamish Hamilton, 2012) by Cambridge academic Dr Robert Macfarlane is a foot-path on an epic scale: a long-distance walking trail through Britain and beyond, taking the reader on a journey that dips not just into history, art and literature but also into geology, zoology and politics. It’s a voyage by land and sea with many diversions: the habits of the limpet and its unwavering homing instinct, the exquisite book-boxes made by Spanish artist Miguel Angel Blanco to record his walks, the barely-perceptible paths marked out by the crofter Manus across the moors on the Isle of Lewis.
Read the full story
Image: A path on the South Downs Way in Sussex Credit: Simon Crowhurst
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
_______________________________________________________