Book Review
The Wild Places By Robert Macfarlane
When CPRE asked passers-by in Nottingham where their favourite place in the county was, their answers were Wollaton Park, the canal and Newstead Abbey. In Robert Macfarlane’s beautifully written and evocative new book he takes us on a journey throughout our land in search of the wildness that remains in these islands, from Cape Wrath to Orford Ness in Suffolk.
Can we think of a “wild place”? It need not be isolated. Robert describes climbing a tall beech tree on the edge of Cambridge – “its bark has sagged and wrinkled, so that it resembles the skin of an elephant’s leg.” This place, he says, “was a way of defraying the city’s claims on me and was the start of my search for the wild places.” He felt a “keen need to leave Cambridge, to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the wind could blow upon me from its’ thirty-six directions and where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent.” His vivid description of places encourages us all to be more observant and to look beyond the obvious.
From a night sleeping out on a cliff or on a beach his descriptions are a transportation to places never seen, and perhaps, in each of us, will awaken an urge to find our own wild place.
Ruth Robinson
