robert macfarlane: how I walk

Britain’s pre-eminent outdoor writer has a spellbinding way of looking at things. But it’s not magic.

There’s a lot to be said for simplicity. Some of the moments I’ll never forget while walking have been wordless. Birdsong, Brocken spectres, blizzards – these are all experiences that are instantaneous, and I’m reluctant to argue people into a more analytic relationship with them. But if you want to enrich your understanding of the outdoors, I would suggest the following. Firstly, all landscapes are interesting; it’s only our torpor or indifference that exhausts them of their interest.

Secondly, don’t fixate on destination. A mountain is much more than its summit, a path much more than the pub at its end. “The thing to be known grows with the knowing,” as Nan Shepherd wrote of the Cairngorms. So walk, talk, wander, wonder.

Thirdly, don’t fixate on premeditating your experience. We now have this eerily supernatural ability to forecast weather, and to pre-view a route or location online. The result is over-determination – and with that comes an annoyance when the walk fails to fall in with your plans, a kind of fist-shaking frustration at the gods for failing to keep their side of the bargain: “Oi! This rain wasn’t on the forecast! No fair!” But at its best, walking is about surprise. So don’t second-guess everything. Get lost, get muddy, get sidetracked. And turn the phone off and bury it in your pack. Wilderness is where you find it. There are many kinds of ‘wild’ in our islands, and I don’t think there’s a single ‘pure’ or ‘true’ wild among them. But of the wild places I value, some would be in the far north-west of Scotland – Assynt, Torridon, Wester Ross – where sea-loch and mountain interweave, and where the Western Isles and St Kilda are the last things between you and America.

Another would be in Cambridge city centre, where I can look up most days and see two peregrine falcons perched on the spires of a 19th-century church, biding time before they help themselves to another meal at the 24-Hour DriveThru Pigeon Fast Food Restaurant. Find a path for all seasons. There’s a field path that leads up to my local woods; it’s a mile from my door to the trees. I estimate that I’ve walked or run it well over a thousand times, in all seasons, by night and by day, in snow and in drought. I wish I’d taken a photograph from the same place along it every two or three times I’ve gone; I’d have a hell of a stop-motion film by now. A pair of sparrowhawks hunt the path. Foxes cross it. Redwings and fieldfares come for the last berries – haws, hips – in winter. I’ve learned a lot from that path, and I like sharing its secrets: it features in the opening pages of both The Wild Places and The Old Ways.

Read and be changed. So much enrichment comes from how others have seen the world. I would highlight Roger Deakin, the author of Wildwood, Waterlog and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, and my friend and mentor until his early death in 2006. Roger re-scaled my sense of place, away from grand landscape gestures, away from remoteness, and towards what he called “the undiscovered country of the nearby”. My children in their younger years felt that attraction very keenly: they had zero interest in getting to the Cuillin Ridge on Skye, but were more than happy to improvise, play and potter in an unremarkable scrap of woodland.

And then Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain. She taught me that a pass is at least as interesting as a peak, and that ‘summit fever’ – focusing on summiting something quickly and at all costs – is a delirium. Look out for the small things. I recently saw evidence of the ‘wood wide web’ on a walk in Epping Forest: the mycorrhizal fungal network that seethes through the soil and joins plant to plant, tree to tree, in a skein of extraordinary complexity, allowing individual trees to share resources and signals with one another. It was one of those revelations that shakes the ground on which you walk. Remember stuff. I worry about how many ideas I’ve lost due to not writing things down. In summer it’s okay; I might have a notebook and pencil in pocket. In winter it’s memory or nothing: too cold to take gloves off to wield pen and paper, and my phone batteries have usually died in the low temperatures. It’s a shame my memory is so shoddy, really; I wish I could go back and pick up some of the sentences that have fallen through its sieve up on the Cairngorm plateau over the years. Help others get outside. I’ve generally been lucky to enjoy robust mental health, but as a university teacher and, well, human being in the world, I find myself dealing with some aspect of our current mental health epidemic on a pretty much daily basis. And again and again I’ve seen the power of nature – not always, not for everybody, and not easily, but often – work to restore calm, or perspective, or a sense of wonder or ease to people in the grip of anxieties and/or depression. I was for some years the patron of a charity called Nature in Mind, and I’m founding trustee of a young charity called Action For Conservation. And my students have founded a walking club called – ahem – The Rob Magogs (their first trip was to the Gog Magog hills south of Cambridge), to help them escape the pressure-cooker of university life; I give them advice on routes. Be concerned. It seems impossible to me to be, now, passionate about nature and not be also both political and ethical about nature. We no longer have the luxury of ‘pure’ pleasure in place, enticing though that is. All landscapes are now to some degree configured by human activity. We are a world-making species, at least in the planetary short-term, and we have to make hard, ongoing choices about the natures of that making. I’m scared by biodiversity loss at a global scale, and by reaching a tipping-point in climate change: the sense that we are watching the first few of the dominoes fall in a long line. Is it within our power to repair these problems? Just. I’m always eager to look for what Rebecca Solnit calls ‘hope in the dark’, and work towards realising those hopes. I want to believe we can, right now, make a difference.

 Robert’s new book Underland, dedicated to the hidden worlds beneath our feet, is published on May 2nd by Penguin. www.penguin.co.uk

“There’s a field path that leads up to my local woods; it’s a mile from my door to the trees. I’ve walked or run it well over a thousand times, in all seasons, by night and by day, in snow drought.” and in