The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
About this audiobook
From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places comes an engrossing exploration of walking and thinking.
In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.
Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology, and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
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About the author
Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence, among others. His best-selling books have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theater, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists, including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Robin Sachs (1951–2013), actor and narrator, was raised in London and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His audiobook narrations earned ten Earphones Awards. His acting credits include Alias, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dynasty, Nowhere Man, Babylon 5, Diagnosis Murder, Galaxy Quest, Northfork, Ocean’s 11, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Megalodon.
