Landmarks

This review was written for Resurgence, who asked for just 700 words. It was published in the May/June 2015 issue.


Landmarks
Robert Macfarlane
Hamish Hamilton £20

Bedwos, crundle, rionnach maoim.  Jammed against each other like pieces of rotting crud in landfill, the words may sound like nonsense — a line of Vogon poetry. But put aside the easy joke, come closer, unfold them and listen. Bedwos is a Welsh word for a grove of birch trees. Crundle, in Hampshire and Sussex dialect, means a thicket in a hollow through which a stream leads.  The Gaelic phrase rionnach maoim refers to the shadows cast on moorland by cumulous clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day. Each arises from a capacity for attention, an echo of a life-way, in which, just possibly, ever-living joy and worth beyond price can be found.

That, at least, is the idea behind a project which Robert Macfarlane, a leading British nature writer, envisages in the introduction to Landmarks.  “We need now, urgently, a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world,” he writes; “a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen.”  And, interspersed through a set of eleven essays about some of the greatest writers in English about nature and place, that is what he offers in this remarkable new book.  In Landmarks, each stratum of a lexico-poetico-meterologico-aesthetico Berlitz abuts a seam of ecologico-topographico-critico-politico Belles Lettres.

As a phrasebook or glossary, Landmarks is a delight and a fascination. Its lumbering size and structure will, however, limits its use in the field.  If you want to know the meaning of glaab or wetchered there is no overall index to show which sub-section of the nine completed sections — on Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands — contains it. (Glaab, by the way, is a Shetland word for an opening between hills or between islands through which a distant object may be seen, while wetchered is what they say in Lincolnshire when you are wet through after being caught out in the rain.)

The essays are vintage Macfarlane. They are studies of and reactions to the work of Nan Shepherd, author of the Living Mountain about her life in the Cairngorm mountains; Roger Deakin, who swam and wooded through the imaginations of millions of readers; J A Baker, obsessive of the peregrine falcon; Richard Jefferies, Jacquetta Hawkes, John Muir and others less well known, including Peter Davidson and Richard Skelton.  Earlier versions of many of these pieces have appeared as introductions to new editions of works by these authors. (The introduction to Landmarks itself is a development of an influential essay first published in 2010.) They will be a great resource for those coming to them for the first time, and will richly repay re-reading. 

“Language isn’t thought but it is a tool of thought” says the anthropologist and linguist Daniel L. Everett.    But the power of this tool, for good or ill, should not be underestimated.   Language that objectifies has, as Macfarlane writes, largely stunned the earth out of wonder, facilitating the rendition of all living things and natural systems into standing reserve ripe for exploitation. But language is also “fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it.”  

And while every generation bears the weight of the past it also creates new spaces of possibility.  Preceding an astonishing revelation in the post script to the book is a marvellous final chapter, drawing on work by Deb Wilenski and her colleagues, about the minds and words of children allowed to run free in a country park in North Cambridgeshire (of all places). As Macfarlane describes it, “no map of it could ever be complete, for new stories seethed up from its soil, and its surfaces could dive way at any moment. The hollows of its trees were routes to other planets, its sub terrane flowed with streams of silver, and its woods were threaded through with filaments of magical force. Within it children could shape-shift into bird, leaf, fish or water.”

Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (Granta) and is writing A New Map of Wonders

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