The Wild Places

Some readers will have read Robert Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, and they will certainly be enthralled by its sequel. The author set out to ask if there are any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland. The answer is emphatically positive, as he evokes in a series of exquisitely delineated journeys into different landscapes, memories and histories. He sleeps out and swims in some rugged landscapes, bringing his experiences intensely alive to the reader. Beginning not far from his home in Cambridge with a wonderful description of sitting up a beech tree, he travels to some of the farthest points in our islands, following in the footsteps of other famous travel writers, to whose ranks he himself now belongs. This is a book to savour, relishing the rhythm and beauty of the author's prose and the breadth of his literary reference.