Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £20)
Here are some words that Robert Macfarlane would like us to know. And not just know, but to use in conversation: astar, griggles, carvet. They mean, respectively, the area of moor where sheep spend their first summer and to which they tend to return (Gaelic); small apples left on the tree (southwest England); and a thick hedgerow (Kent).
Some more words: acorn, buttercup, cygnet, dandelion, lark, mistletoe, newt, otter, willow. In 2007, they were among 50 terms describing nature and the countryside that were deleted from a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words introduced to the dictionary included blog, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, MP3 player and voicemail.
In January this year, Macfarlane, and 27 other writers, including the novelist Margaret Atwood and Helen Macdonald, author of the prize-winning memoir H is for Hawk, wrote to the dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press, to express their dismay at the deletions. OUP defended its decision by saying it is the job of language to describe reality and that the dictionary needed to reflect the experience of modern childhood.
Macfarlane has been at the forefront of the “new nature writing” for 10 years. He was one of the authors included in an issue of Granta magazine dedicated to the movement. Several of the writers included in that anthology—Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Raban, Richard Mabey—were already well known; the distinction between “new” and “old” nature writing, as defined by Granta, referred to an originality of vision: a tendency not to travel in search of the wild but to find it close to home. The new nature writing was “urgent, vital and alert to the defining particulars of our time.” Its intention was to re-enchant the familiar by making it seem new and strange. Macfarlane’s loose trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart—Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways—explores the terrain where language and wilderness meet. But his latest, Landmarks, addresses directly the question of whether language mirrors the world or calls it into existence. He describes it as “a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in the comparison of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as the British Isles.”
Macfarlane was pondering the connection between language and landscape in 2007 when he visited the Outer Hebridean Island of Lewis, where a friend, Finlay MacLeod, showed him a document he had compiled with the title, “Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary.”
MacLeod had been collecting Gaelic words used to describe aspects of the Lewis moorland. The terms, Macfarlane learned, are intensely specific: a list of them amounts, in effect, to a set of directions: a word-map. Macfarlane warns that Gaelic, in common with other languages preoccupied with the fine delineation of natural features, is in danger of “withering on the tongue: the total number of native speakers in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd is now around 58,000.” But when a language is lost more is endangered than mere lexicographical diversity. The purpose of the Peat Glossary was more urgent than a mournful recording of disconnected shards of ancient sensibility.
In 2004, the engineering company Amec filed an application to build a wind farm on the Brindled Moor of Lewis, an area with protected status. “The effect on the landscape resource, character and perception” of Lewis would be, Amec conceded, “major and long term”; the argument in favour of the wind farm was that it would bring jobs and prosperity to the island, and occupy land that was terra nullius—a featureless wasteland.
Those opposed to the farm began a campaign to, as Macfarlane puts it, “re-enchant” the moor: to create narratives that “might restore both particularity and mystery to the moor, and thus counter the vision of it as a ‘vast, dead place.’” Among these “moor-works” was the Peat Glossary, described by MacLeod as a “Counter-Desecration Phrasebook.” In 2008, the Scottish Executive rejected the wind farm application.
Inspired by this example of the power of language not merely to describe a place, but to capture its essence and summon it into imaginative being, Macfarlane concluded that, “We need now, urgently, a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world—a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen. A work of words that would encourage responsible place-making; that would keep us from slipping off into abstract space, and keep us from all that would follow such a slip.” The glossaries contained in Landmarks, he adds, “do not constitute this unwriteable phrasebook—but perhaps they might offer a sight of the edge of the shadow of its impossible existence.”
In 10 chapters punctuated by nine glossaries (a final glossary is “left blank for the place-words that are still to be made”), Macfarlane visits the wild in the company of writers he reveres. The poetry of Nan Shepherd leads him into the Cairngorms. The writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin (whose literary executor he is) inspires a reverie on woods, water and words. He views the world through a raptor’s eyes in the writings of the myopic obsessive JA Baker, author of The Peregrine; explores a Cumbrian tunnel of magic words with the writer and musician Richard Skelton; and surveys the lands of the far north with Barry Lopez. He roams the edgelands with Richard Jefferies; reads the runes with Jacquetta Hawkes; surfs avalanches and scales pine trees with John Muir, the guardian of Yosemite; and enters the realm of childhood fantasy in the company of a group of Cambridge primary school children. All writers suffer from the anxiety of influence, but nature writers seem less troubled by it than most. Perhaps this is because, unlike old-fashioned travel writers, nature writers are not in competition for a dwindling store of virgin territory to explore. For them, a world of new-found particularity can be discerned in the most unpromising surroundings. The “wildness” for which they yearn, and about which they write so plangently, dwells not necessarily in the remoteness of the situation, but rather in the intensity of the onlooker’s gaze.
“Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside,” wrote TH White in his remarkable volume of essays on hunting, fishing and flying, England Have My Bones. In the nature writing of an earlier generation there is often a sense that the wildwood and its inhabitants have become a repository for all the passionate intensity for which the author can find no adequate outlet in human society. “Most men are prisons to themselves,” wrote the poet and essayist Edward Thomas. “I had... regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it,” reflected John Stewart Collis in his farming memoir, The Worm Forgives the Plough. For such men, nature offered a retreat into authenticity from the decadent artifice of a corrupt civilisation.
But among the new nature writers a different kind of sensibility is at work. Macdonald, Skelton and Philip Hoare (author of The Sea Inside) may have turned to nature in response to bereavement, but their writings are self-aware: chronicles of consolation, not open wounds. The new nature writers are not misanthropes or self-conscious outcasts. On the contrary, they are the elect: visionaries and defenders, as Roger Deakin put it in Wildwood, “of the greenwood spirit of democratic freedom.”
The qualities they share with their admired predecessors are a lyrical intensity and a fierce nostalgia for what has been—or is about to be—lost. “As an elegy-in-waiting for a landscape, The Peregrine is comparable with Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams,” Macfarlane observes; the description is equally apt for his own book.
Landmarks invites us to explore a living landscape. Not all of us have easy access to the Cairngorms or the West Pennine moors; but no one in Britain, however city-bound, lives beyond reach of woods and water and the ambiguous edgelands at the city’s margin where Richard Jefferies (and after him Macfarlane) find their eye “caught by signs of nature’s irrepressibility.” It is, too, a generous introduction to the works of authors immersed in a deep intimacy with their patch of land; but it also issues a warning—insistent as the trill of the lark so ignominiously deleted from the dictionary—that we are in imminent danger of becoming cut off from that intimacy, because soon we may no longer have the vocabulary in which to express it.
Macfarlane’s own vocabulary is immense. He writes a riffy, poetic prose, sprung with the incantatory alliterations of Old English poetry, dappled with puns (“the terror in the terroir, the spectred isle”), nonce-words (“It began to rain again, a spittery smirr”) and enticing lexical oddities (“quaquaversal,” “hummadruz”). This is a tone frequent among nature writers, for nature of its essence tends to defy language. To attempt to capture it in words is to eff the ineffable: the English pastoral tradition is an exquisite accumulation of such essays in the evanescent.
Landmarks is a book of many captivating qualities. Reading it, one feels glamoured by the intoxication of the language, and the extraordinary range of Macfarlane’s reference, the urgent generosity of his passion. Yet when it is all over, what lingers is an intimation of what Keats, writing about William Wordsworth, called “the egotistical sublime.”
The invocation of so many other writers lends Macfarlane’s text a singular richness—to read it is like being invited into an eclectic private library. But there is an inherent paradox in the form: we are at once drawn towards the landscape and separated from it by a kind of double mediation: we view nature both through the prism of Macfarlane’s own sensibility and that of the writer he is writing about. The relentless dazzle of glittering verbiage—daringly tinged, in his chapter on childhood, with sentimentality—can leave one at times feeling word-glutted.
Macfarlane makes no secret of his palpable design upon his readers. He wants us—and still more urgently, our children—to follow him out into the fields and the wildwoods and see for ourselves the smeuse, the bagstone and the jeel. And not just see them but name them: incorporate them into our own lexicon of loved things and in doing so, protect them by making them real. It is a potent enchantment, but as the spell wears off, doubts rise.
Macfarlane’s macaronic glossaries have a power for him, because they represent something known to him. For us his incantatory Esperanto has power, but it’s not the enchantment of landscape, but the enchantment of the text. He ends his book with the image of a Tang dynasty artist, Wu Tao-Tzu, disappearing into his own landscape painting: the artist consumed by his own artifice. It is a curiously equivocal image—but an apt one. For while Landmarks is framed as an apologia for the power of words to fix, hold, save and restore the connection between humans and nature, among the upper partials of its clarion prose rings the intimation of a knell: the wonty-tump, the tafolog and the buttercup may survive, not outside in a living landscape, but here—pressed between the pages of a book.
Here are some words that Robert Macfarlane would like us to know. And not just know, but to use in conversation: astar, griggles, carvet. They mean, respectively, the area of moor where sheep spend their first summer and to which they tend to return (Gaelic); small apples left on the tree (southwest England); and a thick hedgerow (Kent).
Some more words: acorn, buttercup, cygnet, dandelion, lark, mistletoe, newt, otter, willow. In 2007, they were among 50 terms describing nature and the countryside that were deleted from a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words introduced to the dictionary included blog, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, MP3 player and voicemail.
In January this year, Macfarlane, and 27 other writers, including the novelist Margaret Atwood and Helen Macdonald, author of the prize-winning memoir H is for Hawk, wrote to the dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press, to express their dismay at the deletions. OUP defended its decision by saying it is the job of language to describe reality and that the dictionary needed to reflect the experience of modern childhood.
Macfarlane has been at the forefront of the “new nature writing” for 10 years. He was one of the authors included in an issue of Granta magazine dedicated to the movement. Several of the writers included in that anthology—Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Raban, Richard Mabey—were already well known; the distinction between “new” and “old” nature writing, as defined by Granta, referred to an originality of vision: a tendency not to travel in search of the wild but to find it close to home. The new nature writing was “urgent, vital and alert to the defining particulars of our time.” Its intention was to re-enchant the familiar by making it seem new and strange. Macfarlane’s loose trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart—Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways—explores the terrain where language and wilderness meet. But his latest, Landmarks, addresses directly the question of whether language mirrors the world or calls it into existence. He describes it as “a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in the comparison of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as the British Isles.”
Macfarlane was pondering the connection between language and landscape in 2007 when he visited the Outer Hebridean Island of Lewis, where a friend, Finlay MacLeod, showed him a document he had compiled with the title, “Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary.”
MacLeod had been collecting Gaelic words used to describe aspects of the Lewis moorland. The terms, Macfarlane learned, are intensely specific: a list of them amounts, in effect, to a set of directions: a word-map. Macfarlane warns that Gaelic, in common with other languages preoccupied with the fine delineation of natural features, is in danger of “withering on the tongue: the total number of native speakers in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd is now around 58,000.” But when a language is lost more is endangered than mere lexicographical diversity. The purpose of the Peat Glossary was more urgent than a mournful recording of disconnected shards of ancient sensibility.
In 2004, the engineering company Amec filed an application to build a wind farm on the Brindled Moor of Lewis, an area with protected status. “The effect on the landscape resource, character and perception” of Lewis would be, Amec conceded, “major and long term”; the argument in favour of the wind farm was that it would bring jobs and prosperity to the island, and occupy land that was terra nullius—a featureless wasteland.
Those opposed to the farm began a campaign to, as Macfarlane puts it, “re-enchant” the moor: to create narratives that “might restore both particularity and mystery to the moor, and thus counter the vision of it as a ‘vast, dead place.’” Among these “moor-works” was the Peat Glossary, described by MacLeod as a “Counter-Desecration Phrasebook.” In 2008, the Scottish Executive rejected the wind farm application.
Inspired by this example of the power of language not merely to describe a place, but to capture its essence and summon it into imaginative being, Macfarlane concluded that, “We need now, urgently, a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world—a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen. A work of words that would encourage responsible place-making; that would keep us from slipping off into abstract space, and keep us from all that would follow such a slip.” The glossaries contained in Landmarks, he adds, “do not constitute this unwriteable phrasebook—but perhaps they might offer a sight of the edge of the shadow of its impossible existence.”
In 10 chapters punctuated by nine glossaries (a final glossary is “left blank for the place-words that are still to be made”), Macfarlane visits the wild in the company of writers he reveres. The poetry of Nan Shepherd leads him into the Cairngorms. The writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin (whose literary executor he is) inspires a reverie on woods, water and words. He views the world through a raptor’s eyes in the writings of the myopic obsessive JA Baker, author of The Peregrine; explores a Cumbrian tunnel of magic words with the writer and musician Richard Skelton; and surveys the lands of the far north with Barry Lopez. He roams the edgelands with Richard Jefferies; reads the runes with Jacquetta Hawkes; surfs avalanches and scales pine trees with John Muir, the guardian of Yosemite; and enters the realm of childhood fantasy in the company of a group of Cambridge primary school children. All writers suffer from the anxiety of influence, but nature writers seem less troubled by it than most. Perhaps this is because, unlike old-fashioned travel writers, nature writers are not in competition for a dwindling store of virgin territory to explore. For them, a world of new-found particularity can be discerned in the most unpromising surroundings. The “wildness” for which they yearn, and about which they write so plangently, dwells not necessarily in the remoteness of the situation, but rather in the intensity of the onlooker’s gaze.
“Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside,” wrote TH White in his remarkable volume of essays on hunting, fishing and flying, England Have My Bones. In the nature writing of an earlier generation there is often a sense that the wildwood and its inhabitants have become a repository for all the passionate intensity for which the author can find no adequate outlet in human society. “Most men are prisons to themselves,” wrote the poet and essayist Edward Thomas. “I had... regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it,” reflected John Stewart Collis in his farming memoir, The Worm Forgives the Plough. For such men, nature offered a retreat into authenticity from the decadent artifice of a corrupt civilisation.
But among the new nature writers a different kind of sensibility is at work. Macdonald, Skelton and Philip Hoare (author of The Sea Inside) may have turned to nature in response to bereavement, but their writings are self-aware: chronicles of consolation, not open wounds. The new nature writers are not misanthropes or self-conscious outcasts. On the contrary, they are the elect: visionaries and defenders, as Roger Deakin put it in Wildwood, “of the greenwood spirit of democratic freedom.”
The qualities they share with their admired predecessors are a lyrical intensity and a fierce nostalgia for what has been—or is about to be—lost. “As an elegy-in-waiting for a landscape, The Peregrine is comparable with Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams,” Macfarlane observes; the description is equally apt for his own book.
Landmarks invites us to explore a living landscape. Not all of us have easy access to the Cairngorms or the West Pennine moors; but no one in Britain, however city-bound, lives beyond reach of woods and water and the ambiguous edgelands at the city’s margin where Richard Jefferies (and after him Macfarlane) find their eye “caught by signs of nature’s irrepressibility.” It is, too, a generous introduction to the works of authors immersed in a deep intimacy with their patch of land; but it also issues a warning—insistent as the trill of the lark so ignominiously deleted from the dictionary—that we are in imminent danger of becoming cut off from that intimacy, because soon we may no longer have the vocabulary in which to express it.
Macfarlane’s own vocabulary is immense. He writes a riffy, poetic prose, sprung with the incantatory alliterations of Old English poetry, dappled with puns (“the terror in the terroir, the spectred isle”), nonce-words (“It began to rain again, a spittery smirr”) and enticing lexical oddities (“quaquaversal,” “hummadruz”). This is a tone frequent among nature writers, for nature of its essence tends to defy language. To attempt to capture it in words is to eff the ineffable: the English pastoral tradition is an exquisite accumulation of such essays in the evanescent.
Landmarks is a book of many captivating qualities. Reading it, one feels glamoured by the intoxication of the language, and the extraordinary range of Macfarlane’s reference, the urgent generosity of his passion. Yet when it is all over, what lingers is an intimation of what Keats, writing about William Wordsworth, called “the egotistical sublime.”
The invocation of so many other writers lends Macfarlane’s text a singular richness—to read it is like being invited into an eclectic private library. But there is an inherent paradox in the form: we are at once drawn towards the landscape and separated from it by a kind of double mediation: we view nature both through the prism of Macfarlane’s own sensibility and that of the writer he is writing about. The relentless dazzle of glittering verbiage—daringly tinged, in his chapter on childhood, with sentimentality—can leave one at times feeling word-glutted.
Macfarlane makes no secret of his palpable design upon his readers. He wants us—and still more urgently, our children—to follow him out into the fields and the wildwoods and see for ourselves the smeuse, the bagstone and the jeel. And not just see them but name them: incorporate them into our own lexicon of loved things and in doing so, protect them by making them real. It is a potent enchantment, but as the spell wears off, doubts rise.
Macfarlane’s macaronic glossaries have a power for him, because they represent something known to him. For us his incantatory Esperanto has power, but it’s not the enchantment of landscape, but the enchantment of the text. He ends his book with the image of a Tang dynasty artist, Wu Tao-Tzu, disappearing into his own landscape painting: the artist consumed by his own artifice. It is a curiously equivocal image—but an apt one. For while Landmarks is framed as an apologia for the power of words to fix, hold, save and restore the connection between humans and nature, among the upper partials of its clarion prose rings the intimation of a knell: the wonty-tump, the tafolog and the buttercup may survive, not outside in a living landscape, but here—pressed between the pages of a book.
