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The Old Ways

By: Robert Macfarlane
Narrated by: Roy McMillan
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Publisher's Summary

The unabridged, digital audiobook edition of Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways, a major new book from one of Britain’s finest nature writers about landscape and the human heart. Read by Roy McMillan.

In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove-roads, and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes crisscrossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents 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, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of song lines and their singers. Above all this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoiter inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.

Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive and celebrated voice, the book folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology, and literature. His tracks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird-islands of the Scottish northwest, and from the disputed territories of Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he walks stride for stride with a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, follows the ‘deadliest path in Britain’, sails an open boat out into the Atlantic at night and crosses paths with walkers of many kinds - wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers, and devouts.

He discovers that paths offer not just means of traversing space, but also of feeling, knowing, and thinking. The old ways lead us unexpectedly to the new, and the voyage out is always a voyage inwards.

©2012 Robert Macfarlane (P)2012 Penguin Audio
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What listeners say about The Old Ways

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My favourite read/listen this year

This is a thoroughly absorbing account of walking historic paths, a combination of research, contemporary local people and lived experience. I recommend it to walkers, armchair travellers and lovers of local history.

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Superb writing, shame about the narrator

I loved Macfarlane’s extraordinarily poetical prose, however I suspect it’s best encountered on the page rather than in the ear, in part because it’s so intricate and rich that it deserves to be read very slowly, and in part because, in this case, at least, the narrator “performs” the book far too forcefully, injecting himself into prose that already eloquently speaks for itself. Eventually (about three-quarters of the way through) I got used to it, but from now on I’ll be reading Macfarlane’s work in print.

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Beautiful

Gosh I loved this book, my first experience of Robert Macfarlane. It is beautifully written and beautifully read. Highly recommend for anyone who enjoys the subtleties of the world around them. Will revisit this book many times

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A fantastic listen

Fascinating book that is full of interesting information. A very meditative listen. I look forward to listening to others by the same author.

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Gorgeous

A delight from cover to cover, looking forward to reading all his others. Narration voice is also excellent

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Beautifully written travelogue

The language is crisp but full of old poetic words used to describe geology pathways and ancient stories combined with modern insights and analogies

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Fantastic!

A beautifully written and narrated book. Easy to lose yourself in the immersive writing.

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