Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  ‘Jurassic water snails … praise their God’: AL, p. 70.

  ‘Stand at Moreton-in-the Marsh … from desolation to desolation’: ibid., p. 91.

  ‘our composed Britain’: ibid., p. 45.

  ‘speak of insecurity … known to us as the British Isles’: ibid., pp. 16, 24.

  ‘blessed heritage of farmers … radar and jet propulsion’: Iain Sinclair, ‘The Festival of Britain’, Guardian, 22 April 2011.

  ‘regional difference … restoration of their country’: AL, pp. 100, 201.

  ‘for a faint but palpable … mountain regions’: ibid., pp. 218–23.

  ‘the land under him … with a fierce longing’: T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 109–12.

  ‘sense of community … parson, shepherd and clerk’: J. B. Priestley, Postscripts (London: William Heinemann, 1940), p. 12.

  ‘the racial stock’: AL, p. 180.

  ‘for months … Yours faithfully, Henry Williamson’: letter from Henry Williamson to Jacquetta Hawkes, 1 February 1952, Jacquetta Hawkes Archive, University of Bradford.

  ‘a rock … full of fossils … stone to speak’: AL, p. 98.

  ‘When we concentrate on … not of the now’: Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (1972; London: Penguin, 2012), p. 7.

  Chapter 10: The Black Locust and the Silver Pine

  ‘I am a poetico- … ornith-natural, etc.!’: John Muir to Robert Underwood Johnson, quoted in Terry Gifford, Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 42.

  ‘The world is big … good look at it before it gets dark’: John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 313.

  ‘Everybody needs beauty as well as bread’: John Muir, The Yosemite (1912), in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books (Diadem: London, 1992), p. 714.

  ‘The clearest way … a forest wilderness’: Muir, John of the Mountains, p. 313.

  ‘Writing … is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind’: John Muir, letter to Sarah Muir Galloway, 17 April 1876, reprinted in John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings, ed. Terry Gifford (London: Baton Wicks, 1996), p. 221.

  ‘an infinite storm of beauty’: John Muir, Travels in Alaska (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, p. 724.

  ‘Wildness is a necessity … but as fountains of life’: John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), p. 1.

  ‘glorious … conversion’: John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), in NW, p. 161.

  ‘This fine lesson charmed me … meadows in wild enthusiasm’: John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), in NW, pp. 138–9.

  ‘opened to … inner beauty’: ibid., p. 139.

  ‘old bondage days’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, p. 161.

  ‘ “But where do you want to go? … any place that is wild,” I said’: Muir, The Yosemite, in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, p. 613.

  ‘gradually higher … best places we came to’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, p. 153.

  ‘We are now in the mountains … we seem to have been so always’: ibid., p. 161.

  ‘Most people are on the world … touching but separate’: Muir, John of the Mountains, p. 320.

  ‘One’s body seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, p. 228.

  ‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co. … they are in me-ee-ee’: letter from John Muir to Mrs Ezra Carr, c. 1870 (dating uncertain), in John Muir: His Life and Letters, p. 140.

  ‘indeed … the tree-lover’s paradise’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, p. 209.

  ‘silky gray carpet … three inches high’: ibid., p. 281.

  ‘forest kings … 300 feet in height’: John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Century, 1894), in NW, pp. 436, 424.

  ‘knowledge … time in the almanac sense’: Muir, Mountains of California, in NW, p. 403.

  ‘silvery luster … satiny’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, pp. 251, 249.

  ‘wind-history … storm story’: ibid., pp. 185, 235.

  ‘beneath the interlacing arches … paw out oval hollows’: Muir, Mountains of California, in NW, p. 445.

  ‘lithe, brushy top … continuous blaze of white sun-fire’: ibid., pp. 467–70.

  ‘broad gray summit … a beautiful shrubby species’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, pp. 241–2.

  ‘becomes so adhesive … no small geological significance’: ibid., p. 227.

  ‘as trackless as the sky’: ibid., p. 185.

  ‘the wild gala-day of the north wind’: Muir, Mountains of California, in NW, p. 340.

  ‘fiery, peppery, full of brag … sting the onlooker’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, p. 193.

  ‘cloudland … hills and domes of cloud’: ibid., p. 185.

  ‘How fine the weather is! … peace to every living thing!’: ibid., p. 172.

  ‘showy and fragrant’: ibid., p. 163.

  ‘I was swished down … been more gloriously exciting!’: Muir, The Yosemite, in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, p. 638.

  ‘fastens a hard, durable crust … night on the mountain-top’: Muir, Mountains of California, in NW, p. 351.

  ‘scalding gas jets’: Muir, ‘Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta’, in NW, p. 644.

  ‘The strange, wild thrilling motion … escape being shattered’: Muir, The Yosemite, in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, p. 643.

  ‘a vast undulated wave’: John Muir, ‘Mountain Sculpture’, Overland Monthly 12 (1874–5), 393.

  ‘knife-blade … smooth cobblestones’: Muir, Mountains of California, in NW, pp. 545–6.

  ‘destruction of the forests … falling before fire and the ax’: ibid., p. 547.

  ‘rosiny logs … sunbeams of centuries of summers’: Muir, My First Summer, in NW, pp. 202–3.

  ‘Few are altogether deaf … forest preservation would vanish’: John Muir, ‘The National Parks and Forest Reservations’, speech given at a meeting of the Sierra Club on 23 November 1895 and published in Sierra Club Bulletin 1:7 (January 1896), 282–3.

  ‘A lot of activists expect … they only germinate after fire’: Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), pp. 85–6, 93.

  Chapter 11: Childish

  ‘As you sit on the hillside … look like a door, opens’: Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping (1927; London: Thomas Nelson, 1938), p. 63.

  ‘Between every two pines is a door leading to a new life’: the phrase does not occur in Muir’s published works; he handwrote it on a page of his copy of the first volume of Emerson’s Prose Works. See for an account of the pursuit of the source of this elusive quotation: http://www.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/Muir/QuotableJohnMuir.html.

  ‘It had gone again … that the house was gone’: Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), pp. 30–31.

  ‘Children have many more … terms to translate them’: Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew (1897; London: Penguin, 1966), p. 9.

  ‘the hundred languages of children’: Loris Malaguzzi, in The Hundred Languages of Children, ed. Carolyn Edward (New Jersey: Norwood, 1993), p. vi.

  ‘It was cold when we began … nobody seemed to mind’: AFG, p. 4.

  ‘the real and fantastical place that the park was becoming’: ibid.

  ‘with imagination and with daring … connect one place to another’: ibid., p. 5.

  ‘a place of possibility … ordinary and the fantastic’: ibid.

  ‘yellow at the edges … pink forest’: ibid., pp. 8, 11.

  ‘of newly made mud’: ibid., p. 12.

  ‘secret water … continuous, touchable surface’: ibid., pp. 20–21.

  ‘After one of his shipwreckings
… It was quite soft’: Tim Dee, ‘Naming Names’ Caught by the River, 25 June 2014, http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/06/naming-names-tim-dee-robert-macfarlane/.

  ‘shelter day-dreaming … topophilia’: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 6.

  ‘The children out in the woods … they’re extinct’: Chris Packham, quoted in ‘Let Children Trespass and Start Fires’, Daily Telegraph, 20 May 2014.

  ‘returning the results to London … patterns of land use’: Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the Word (London: Tauris, 2008), p. 166.

  ‘use the green lanes … lonely gates for horseriders’: William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (London: Longmans, 1838), p. 43.

  ‘bustle … school-children upon bypaths’: Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), p. 127.

  ‘the sandlots and creek beds … of literature itself?’: Michael Chabon, ‘Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood’, New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009.

  ‘A door, a door … with his whole body’: AFG, p. 20.

  ‘the travelling to reach … somewhere else too’: ibid., pp. 15, 16.

  ‘Childhood is a branch of cartography’: Chabon, ‘Manhood for Amateurs’.

  ‘map of maps … map of the mind’s adventures’: AFG, pp. 34, 36.

  ‘weaved words and ways together’: ibid., p. 28.

  ‘honeyfurs’: ibid., p. 29.

  ‘My name is Kian … I was born in space and Mars’: ibid., p. 28.

  ‘This is the mountain … just climb up here’: ibid., p. 35.

  ‘hold infinite possibilities … an invisible door’: ibid., pp. 38, 25.

  Select Bibliography

  Landmarks is itself a bibliography of a kind, so I do not intend (on the whole) to list here books that have already been mentioned. Details of those can be found in the main text or the notes. Rather, what follows should be taken as a partial map of the tributaries and outflows of that main current: a selection of the books, poems, plays, songs, films, music, blogs, sound-works and essays that have influenced Landmarks, or to which Landmarks has led me, but that have remained uncited to this point. I have asterisked those works that have been particularly important.

  On Children and Nature

  Griffiths, Jay, Kith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013)

  Nabhan, Gary Paul, and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)

  On Creaturely Life

  Herzog, Werner (dir.), Grizzly Man (2005)

  Hines, Barry, A Kestrel for a Knave (London: Penguin, 1968)

  Hughes, Ted, The Hawk in the Rain (London: Faber and Faber, 1957)

  Santner, Eric, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006)

  *Simms, Colin, Goshawk Lives (London: Form Books, 1995)

  *––––––, Gyrfalcon Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2007)

  –––––––, Otters and Martens (Exeter: Shearsman, 2006)

  White, T. H., The Goshawk (1951; New York: NYRB Classics, 2007)

  On Close Attention

  Blythe, Ronald, At the Yeoman’s House (London: Enitharmon, 2013)

  Borodale, Sean, Bee Journal (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012)

  Browne, Thomas, The Major Works (London: Penguin, 1977)

  Clare, John, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

  Clark, Thomas A., Yellow and Blue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014)

  Dee, Tim, Four Fields (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013)

  Lane, Cathy, The Hebrides Suite (Hanau and Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder, 2013)

  Larkin, Peter, ‘Being Seen for Seeing: A Tribute to R. F. Langley’s Journals’, available here: http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2008/08/being-seen-for-seeing-tribute-to-r-f.html

  ––––––, Leaves of a Field (Exeter: Shearsman, 2006)

  *Lopez, Barry, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (New York: Knopf, 1998)

  ––––––, Crossing Open Ground (New York: Scribner, 1988)

  Mabey, Richard, The Common Ground (London: Hutchinson, 1980)

  Morgan, Ann Haven, The Field Book of Ponds and Streams (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930)

  Murdoch, Iris, Existentialists and Mystics (London: Penguin, 1997)

  Oswald, Alice, Woods Etc. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005)

  *Robinson, Tim, Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2006)

  ––––––, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2011)

  ––––––, Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2008)

  Sinclair, Iain, The Edge of the Orison (London: Penguin, 2005)

  *Skelton, Richard, SKURA [complete musical works and accompanying text] (Cumbria: Corbel Stone Press, 2012)

  Ward, Colin, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 1997)

  On Language and Landscape

  Basso, Keith, ‘ “Speaking with Names”: Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache’, Cultural Anthropology 3:2 (1988), 99–130

  Billeter, Jean-François, The Chinese Art of Writing (New York: Rizzoli, 1995)

  *Bonnefoy, Yves, Beginning and End of the Snow/Début et Fin de la Neige, trans. Emily Grosholz (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012)

  *Clark, Thomas A., The Hundred Thousand Places (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009)

  DeSilvey, Caitlin, Simon Naylor and Colin Sackett (eds.), Anticipatory History (Axminster: Uniformbooks, 2011)

  Evans, Gareth, and Di Robson (eds.), Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings (London: ArtEvents, 2010)

  Finlay, Alec, and Ken Cockburn, The Road North, see: http://www.theroadnorth.co.uk/

  Friel, Brian, Translations (1980; London: Faber and Faber, 2012)

  Goodwin, Mark, sound-enhanced poetry, at https://soundcloud.com/kramawoodgin

  Gorman, Rody, Sweeney: An Intertonguing (forthcoming)

  Groom, Nick, The Seasons (London: Atlantic, 2013)

  Kinsella, John, Disclosed Poetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)

  Leonard, Stephen, The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging (London: Francis Boutle, 2014)

  Marsden, Philip, Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (London: Granta, 2014)

  Meloy, Ellen, Eating Stone (New York: Pantheon, 2005)

  Mengham, Rod, ‘Grimspound’, in Contourlines, ed. Neil Wenborn (Cromer: Salt, 2009)

  Proulx, E. Annie, ‘Big Skies, Empty Places’, New Yorker, 25 December 2000

  Ray, Andrew, Some Landscapes blog, http://some-landscapes.blogspot.co.uk/

  *Robinson, Tim, My Time in Space (Dublin: Lilliput, 2001)

  Spirn, Anne Whiston, The Language of Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998)

  Thomson, Derick, Meall Garbh: The Rugged Mountain (Glasgow: Gairm, 1995)

  On Metaphor

  Curry, Patrick, ‘Radical Metaphor’, in Earthlines (August 2013), 35–8

  Donoghue, Denis, Metaphor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014)

  Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (1980; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

  On Naming and Knowing

  *AR, Wolf Notes (Cumbria: Corbel Stone Press, 2010)

  Bailly, Jean-Christophe, Le Dépaysement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011)

  Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber, 1987)

  Chatterjee, Debjani (ed.), Daughters of a Riverine Land (Sheffield: Bengali Women’s Support Group, 2003)

  ––––––, Words Spit and Splinter (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 2009)

  *Clifford, Sue, and Angela King, England in Particular (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)

  Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005)

  Heaney, Seamus, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber and Faber, 1987
)

  ––––––, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975)

  Hoban, Russell, Riddley Walker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980)

  Grigson, Geoffrey, The Englishman’s Flora (London: Phoenix House, 1955)

  *Mabey, Richard, Flora Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996)

  Michaels, Anne, Fugitive Pieces (1996; London: Bloomsbury, 1997)

  Robertson, Robin, and Alasdair Roberts, ‘Leaving St Kilda’, in Hirta Songs (Southend: Stone Tape, 2013)

  Self, Will, The Book of Dave (London: Viking, 2006)

  Solnit, Rebecca, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (San Francisco: University of California Press, 2010)

  Stewart, George, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; New York: NYRB Classics, 2008)

  *Stilgoe, John R., Shallow Water Dictionary (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004)

  Turner, Nancy J., Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014)

  On Thinking with Landscape

  *Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon, 1996)

  Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974)

  –––––––, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper & Row, 1982)

  *Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, ed. Curt Meine (New York: Library Classics, 2013)

  Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995)

  Wylie, John, ‘Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (2009), 275–89

  On Wonder

  Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park, Wonder and the Orders of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001)

  Descartes, René, The Passions of the Soul (1649), in Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 1998)

  *Fisher, Philip, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003)

  Henderson, Caspar, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (London: Granta, 2012)

  –––––, A New Map of Wonders (London: Granta, forthcoming)

  Hoffman, Julian, The Small Heart of Things (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 2013)