SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2012 THE SUNDAY TIMES #3 BESTSELLER The genre-defining book by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane: travel Britain's ancient paths and discover the secrets of this beautiful, underappreciated landscape Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit...

Holloway - a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed deep down into bedrock. In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin - author of Wildwood - travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres & great strangeness. Six years later, after Roger Deakin's early death, Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape. Moving in the spaces between...

From Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed author of The Old Ways--a celebration of the language of landscape and the power of words to shape our sense of place

For years now, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has been collecting place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles. In this, his fifth book, Macfarlane brilliantly explores the linguistic and literary terrain of the British archipelago, from the Shetlands to Cornwall and from Cumbria to Suffolk, offering themed glossaries of hundreds...

From the acclaimed author of The Old Ways and Landmarks -- an essay on the joy of reading, for anyone who has ever loved a book Every book is a kind of gift to its reader, and the act of giving books is charged with a special emotional resonance. It is a meeting of three minds (the giver, the author, the recipient), an exchange of intellectual and psychological currency, that leaves each participant enriched. Here Robert Macfarlane recounts the story of a book he was given as a young man, and how he managed eventually to return the favour, though never repay the debt. From one of the most...

'A wonderful evocation of Britain's natural beauty and a reminder of our need to connect with the wilderness' The Times Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? From forest to moor, mountain to saltmarsh, Robert Macfarlane explores the wild places of Britain to see the wonders we still possess. In his beautiful, bewitching, inspiring modern classic of nature writing, the acclaimed author of Underland and The Lost Words presents a portrait of a vanishing but still miraculous British landscape. 'Time and again...