About the Author

Robert Macfarlane is the author of  prizewinning books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland . He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Reviews

“A formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence – poetry really – with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach far transcend the physical region he explores . . . the natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane’s devoted observations.” – The New York Times Book Review
 
“Macfarlane delivers crisp, engaging scenes . . . by the end of his peregrinations he had won me over completely.” – Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe
 
“In this eloquent travelogue, Macfarlane explores the last undomesticated landscapes in Britain and Ireland in a narration that blends history, memoir, and meditation . . . His striking prose not only evokes each locale’s physicality in sensuous, deliberate detail, it glows with a reverence for nature in general and takes the reader on both a geographical and a philosophical journey.” – Publishers Weekly

"The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature'" -- Scotland on Sunday (UK)

"Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow'"--Sunday Times (London)

"Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again" --Metro (London)

"He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful" --Antony Gormley, artist