When, perhaps 500 years from now, historians manage to gain some perspective on our restless and greedy age, they may identify a group of figures who, like the Celtic hermit-saints of the postRoman period, kept going the flame of a compelling belief – in this case, that the human spirit should be constantly refreshed by exposure to the natural world. They might rediscover the work of Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard or the ethics of the “deep ecology” movement. From our own shores and our own time, they may dust off the lyrical writings of Richard Mabey, the late Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Mark Cocker or Alice Oswald, and find in them an ancient wisdom given new urgency – the transcendent joy that can be gained from hours spent in close scrutiny of a river, from watching rooks flood the evening sky or from listening to the rise and fall of the wind high in a canopy of beech.

Robert Macfarlane and his beautifully pitched The Wild Places can be placed at once at the centre of this vibrant literary school. He has moved on from his impressive first book, Mountains of the Mind – a study of the siren call of great peaks – to a less rarefied and rather more didactic work. Confining himself to the British Isles, he sets out to discover whether anything like wilderness remains. On a series of forays from his home in Cambridge, he strides out into the blasted north of Scotland, the far west of Wales and Ireland. His method is both plucky and committed. He sleeps out. He bivvies down in rock hollows, sand dunes, pine woods. He watches the stars emerge from velvety skies, wakes to autumn storms, spring sun, geese calls, shearwaters, silence.

One night on the summit of Ben Hope, he erects a low windbreak and rolls out his bedding. High on mainland Britain’s most northerly peak, in midwinter, in one of the

least populated areas of Europe, he reaches the logical limit of his original idea – and is overwhelmed by anxiety and cold. He can’t wait to descend. Worst of all, he feels “no companionship with the land, no epiphany of relation”.

From then on, his quest for wildness continues more quietly. He travels the deep-cut lanes of Dorset, the moors of the Peak District, the flats of Essex and the Norfolk coast. He peers at the miniature jungles in the cracks of the Burren’s limestone in County Clare. He finds, by looking intently, and closer to home, a more universal and rewarding wildness: more layered, greener, less rocky. It is, he writes, “the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic”.

The arc of Macfarlane’s personal journey does nothing to compromise the guiding principles of his travels. The Wild Places does not follow a narrative path, but the looser course of ideas. Britain’s wilderness has been all but destroyed. The flat abstractions of the road atlas are more familiar to us than the actual features of the land. We need a new cartography, he urges. We need dream-maps and memory-maps, maps that connect geological eras or plot the tracks of avian migration. His own book he intends as a map to “link headlands, cliffs, beaches, mountain-tops, tors, forests, river-mouths and waterfalls”.

Yet what really motivates him is something more fundamental. He revels in the physicality of the wild and calls for a renewed intimacy with it. “We have,” he writes, “come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits.” The lives we lead are virtual, cocooned from the pleasures and discomforts of being outside in all weathers. As a result, “new maladies of the soul have emerged”.

To help his case, Macfarlane calls on a number of literary forebears (attentive spirits such as Ivor Gurney and JA Baker, fellow night-wanderers such as Coleridge and Edward Thomas) for whom the landscape and the fauna of the British Isles became a portal for the imagination. He goes into the technical detail of phosphorescence and the biophysics of night sight. He discusses tree-climbing in literature. His friendship with Deakin, whose own immersions in the wet and wild helped shape the book, runs like a motif through the writing. (Deakin’s death is a rare emotional moment in a book that is more concerned with nonhuman relationships.)

But it is Macfarlane himself who is his own best advocate, not so much through his eloquent debating, nor because of the hardship he endures, but through his crystalline prose. He is a descriptive writer of breathtaking power. In a few words, he conjures up not only the shapes and dynamics of the land, but the experience of being absorbed by it. The after-images of The Wild Places left me with the strange impression of having walked alongside him as he tramped the open spaces of Sutherland or Derbyshire, of having heard the flock of doves rise “applauding into the sky”, of having watched him pick up a buzzard feather and delicately “unzip its vanes”, or of looking up at a half-frozen waterfall in the Cumbrian fells and seeing “the hard portcullis of ice beautifully mottled by dark figures of thaw”.

Prose as precise as this is not just evocative. It is a manifesto in itself. Macfarlane’s language urges us to gaze more closely at the wonders around us, to take notice, to remind ourselves how thrillingly alive a spell in the wild can make us feel. It is a measure of the distance we have strayed from the natural world that The Wild Places should be so poignant, so full of yearning, and so apt. Five hundred years ago, before the acquisitive and cushioning effects of the Enlightenment, such a work would have appeared either incomprehensible or too obvious. We might hope that anyone picking it up in another 500 years will feel just as baffled.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
Granta £18.99 pp340
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

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