The Nature Reader

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/20/laurie-lee-centenary-birth-english-travel-writer-walking-robert-macfarlane

Gavin Maxwell

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/gavin-maxwells-bitter-legacy-was-the-otter-man-the-wildlife-champion-he-appeared-to-be-9595629.html

Macfarlane

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/11/john-mullan-book-club-old-ways-robert-macfarlane

(Note that there is a chance to stalk him, Branwell, at the bottom of the article).

Ha! The Guardian missed a trick. Instead of having him give a talk, they should have had him lead a walk. Mass trespass on ... somewhere. I'd have gone to that.

Can you imagine Macfarlane leading a walk and everyone trying to be his best friend and/or have a Monbiot-style "man-off" with him?

Watching that, to be honest, would be half the fun!

http://littletoller.co.uk/2014/07/the-ash-tree-by-oliver-rackham/

Ooh, that looks good!

More MacFarlane:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/01/robert-macfarlane-old-ways-book-club

Helen MacDonald's "H is for Hawk" is getting a lot of love, isn't it?

That Macfarlane, he turns up everywhere! he turned up in a chapter of Gossip From The Forest by Sara Maitland (which is also a good book if you like forests and fairy tales and is relevant to the interests of this thread*.)

*Though she gets points off for a couple of schoolboy errors about The Great North Wood, I'm sure her knowledge of Scottish forests is far better.

But is there an *actually* concise, or better yet pocket one, suitable for taking with one on walks, in order to establish the difference between e.g. Borage, Bugloss and Green Alkanet while in the field? Because concise the Keble-Martin may be, but portable it is not!

don't know if you found one or not but all the marjorie blamey books are great. the one that really helped me was this...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ZHB1GKNVL.jpg

... though obviously the downside is that it's not that useful when the plant isn't in flower. sizewise, it's unfortunately a bit too big for most pockets, but it is slim enough to slip in yr bag

woah wait up - congrats on yr cbtr thing! looks great

Hey, thanks, yeah, it's been a lot of fun doing it.

In the end, I got a Bloomsbury pocket guide, but it wasn't actually that helpful. Partly because it's arranged by family; not helpful when you don't even know the family. there is a pull-out sheet of "common plants" by bloom colour, but this leads to the second problem: a lot of these books are wide-ranging "flowers of Britain". And I don't know if they're primarily aimed at people who live in the countryside, and therefore feature a lot of meadow plants. What I'd really like is a super-localised "London weed guide" which features the stuff that grows round here a lot (which may not be as common in the rest of the country because 1) it's several degrees warmer on the Urban Heat Island or 2) so many garden escapees).

The best thing that happened for my flower knowledge recently, though, was meeting Roy from the South London Botanical Institute - he does a lot of guided wildflower walks all around the commons near my house. And he is highly knowledgeable and endlessly patient with over-bouncy new enthusiasts demanding "What's this? What's this?" over and over again. Doing three of his walks on local commons taught me more than any of the books. (I took copious notes, with mine own descriptions, too.) But his combination of folk tales and bizarro facts that you are not likely to forget ("It smells like mice!") has been super helpful.

oh that sounds fun! and it's definitely the quirky descriptions and alternative names for things that help them stick in yr brain i think

"It smells like mice!"

lemme guess - herb robert right?

Nope - hemlock!

And I'll never forget Stinking Tutson - bushy plant, yellow flowers, smells like "a goat."

oh, hemlock's a toughie to i.d.; all those umbillifers are a nightmare, but i really ought to get to grips with the nasty ones

eeek, this sounds terrifying:

Though somewhat similar in appearance to other plants with 'hemlock' in their common names, Conium maculatum is distinguished by its action of killing from the outside in as numbness of the extremities slowly becomes paralysis of the lungs. It has no effect on the brain.

my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock i had drunk

Purple patches on the stalk (plus mousey odour) are your giveaways that it's the nasty one. I always thought (because of Romantic poetry etc.) that it was rather a nice, languid, dreamy death but apparently not!

Roy Vickery has written a "Book of Unlucky Flowers" (hemlock v unlucky, I would imagine!) which I need to try to find.

Picked up R Jefferies' Nature Near London, with MacFarlane intro, today. Not sure the Collins Nature Library series ran for more than three books but they are nice editions. The New Naturalist series is also lovely but phenomenally expensive.

That was a bizarrely truncated series, wasn't it? It went pretty much nowhere.

Reading a book about a hill I will never walk up, despite it being less than 50 miles away.

What is the hill, and why will you never walk up it?

jefferies was one of my literary heroes when i was a teenager. once spent a week walking the ridgeway path with just his book 'the story of my heart' for company, sleeping rough near all those neolithic hill forts etc. an intense experience at the time, maybe kinda sad in hindsight - i'm sure i should have been out raving instead.

new naturalists are expensive but they're great books that only go up in price after they go out of print. the oliver rackham woodlands one is really really good if you're into woodland ecosystems, makes me want to tunnel into the undergrowth and get all wild and fungal

Why would you say those experiences are "kinda sad"? They sound actually kinda amazing, to me. What experiences would you have had raving that you did not have walking the Ridgeway? (Drugs? Sexual partners? I dunno.)

Been thinking about mine own isolated teenage years - how much of my years 13 to about 18 I spent exploring the woods of the Hudson Valley with no company but a dog. And yeah, maybe I should have been going to see the Jesus and Mary Chain at CBGB's or whatever it was that the direct contemporaries I would later become friends with were doing. But I think that exposure to landscapes and habitats and the appreciation both of "nature" (not sure what that means in an environment that has been worked as long as the Ridgeway has, but this is the essential conundrum of this whole thread, isn't it?) and Deep Time (seeing layers of human habitation, and how they get swept away - I didn't have hillforts, but I certainly had abandoned Colonial era homesteads) is surely a meaningful educational foundation for a human life?

(mutters something about uncool rural upbringings and learning the concept of self reliance, and the ability to manufacture one's own entertainments or diversions etc blah blah blah)

need to mull this over really, but... well i was rather socially unfulfilled due to shyness etc, and i think that disappearing into the countryside was kind of my attempt at forging some small bond with the world outside of my bedroom walls. i dunno, i was a daft and dreamy teen with no real clue about life outside of what i found in books and records.

x-post.

Silbury. You're not allowed to walk up it any more (visitors were causing too much damage).

Finding it quite a weird experience but it's not as if I've had plans to walk, say, all Macfarlane's paths (aside from the "dangerous" beach one).

Thoroughly enjoying Waterlog at the moment, thanks to this thread. It's a nice escape from having spent the entire year in cities with populations of 1m+. I can barely remember what the countryside looks like.

Also picked up A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes, Remote Britain by David St John Thomas and Four Hedges yesterday.

Ah. But Silbury Hill isn't ~really a hill~, says I, it's an ancient monument! It's totally manmade! (I thought; maybe I should read the book to find out.) And generally Wiltshire don't allow you to go wandering about ancient monuments any more.

I mean, often when I read these books, I get the urge to go and investigate the places, but they're never really ones that are actually accessible to me to start with, so I just google them and look at photos of them and aerial photography of them, and just pretend, what it would be like to be there. So this is rather a familiar feeling, rather than an odd one.

Now I keep seeing H Is For Hawk advertised and reviewed and interviewed and praised everywhere. And though I do generally get the impression that it's very good, I don't know why I can't bring myself to read it. (Might be simple vegetarian squeamishness; don't know.)

Just noticed (having finished "On Silbury Hill") that Little Toller have commissioned a monograph from Richard Skelton ("Fen Wall").

Yes, I've got a similar resistance to H is for Hawk.

Just enjoyed Mabey's "Home Country" - an easy, enjoyable read. Had a vague feeling that I'd read lots of it before (presumably in his other books).

Oh my god, I'm doing a book!

How the hell did this happen?

!!! oh wow - congratulations! can you share any details?

Well, it's an expanded, printed version of Ghosts of the Great North Wood.

More details once we hammer them out.

I'm swinging back and forth between wild excitement, mild disbelief and total "OMG who decided I could do a book? ~Ha!~" impostor syndrome and wondering when they will find me out.

hot damn, that's great! well done indeed :)

Nice one.

(Don't forget us on the Nature Reader thread when you're hangin' out on the Nature Writer one).

I heard some very funny gossip about a nature writer oft discussed on this thread, but obviously, I cannot share it. ;-)

Well, it's an expanded, printed version of Ghosts of the Great North Wood.

More details once we hammer them out.

I'm swinging back and forth between wild excitement, mild disbelief and total "OMG who decided I could do a book? ~Ha!~" impostor syndrome and wondering when they will find me out.

― Shugazi (Branwell with an N), Thursday, 18 September 2014 09:59 (3 days ago) Bookmark

Delighted to hear this - it will be a book *worth having*.

Go on, tell us your R-Mac story ...

It is not my story to tell.

Oh well.

Any books to recommend?

Currently reading George Ewart Evans' The Pattern Under The Plough. I've run out of steam with it a bit but notice that Richard Skelton lists it in his top ten favourite books (for those also reading The "classical" music you buy from Boomkat (2010): a thread to discuss Sylvain Chauveau, Johann Johannsson, Peter Broderick, Olafur Arnalds and others).

I'm not reading a nature book right now, but I am reading Noise by David Hendy, which is turning out to be a lot more interesting than anticipated. A social history of sound and human attitudes towards it. (All kinds of sound, music, natural sounds, speech, annoyances, mechanisation, shamanism, medicine, technology.) It goes a bit too fast, and covers so much ground so quickly I do sometimes wish he'd expand each individual subsection into a longer chapter, but I suppose it'd be 700 pages long then.

Probably outside the remit of this thread, though.

Currently undecided about whether to re-read "The Journal of A Disappointed Man" (for lifestyle tips) or to start Rackham's "The Ash Tree" ...

Simon Prosser on reading Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks

Hamish Hamilton Publishing Director Simon Prosser describes his experience reading Landmarks, the forthcoming title from bestselling travel writer and author of The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane.

“When I finished reading the first draft of Robert Macfarlane’s new book on landscape and language, I found that my vocabulary had notably and delightfully expanded:

I now knew ‘rionnach maoim’ (a Hebridean Gaelic term for ‘the shadows cast by cumulus clouds on moorland on a sunny, windy day’); ‘smeuse’ (Sussex dialect for ‘the hole in the base of a hedgerow made by the repeated passage of a small animal’); ‘af’rug’ (a Shetland word for ‘the reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore’); and ‘wind-fucker’ (the perfect East Anglian dialect nickname for a kestrel), along with ‘blonking’ (snowing), ‘babbing’ (fishing for eels) and ‘jirglin’ (playing about with water).”

All of these words, and thousands more, collected over a decade by Rob from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from Pembrokeshire to Suffolk, and from old Norse to Romani, appear in Landmarks, in the nine glossaries which interleave the ten chapters of the book. (Landmarks also describes Rob’s journeys into the mines of Cumbria, the moors of the Hebrides and the corries of the Cairngorms, as well as his meetings with glossarians, poets and word-collectors up and down the country.)

Landmarks is a book about the power of language – ‘strong style, single words’ in Rob’s phrase – to shape our sense of place. It is both a field-guide to the literature he loves (Nan Shepherd, Barry Lopez and Roger Deakin and more) and also a ‘Word-Hoard’, to borrow the title of the opening chapter. Over the course of the book we can chart a kind of love-affair between writer and language. The authors Rob is most drawn to tend to write with an exact and committed intensity about their chosen landscapes, in styles strong enough to revise our imaginary relations with places. They aim, in the words from Emerson which Rob quotes in the book, to ‘pierce…rotten diction and fasten words to visible things’, They are celebrants of the specific – and so too is Rob.

Over the book’s course, via its chapters and its glossaries , we come to realise that words and language, well-used, are not just a means to describe landscape, but also a way to know it, and ultimately to love it. If we lose the rich vernacular, regional, demotic lexis of these islands, developed over centuries, then we also risk losing our relationship to nature and the land. What we cannot name, we cannot in some sense see.

In the first chapter of Landmarks Rob writes grippingly about the battle to prevent a farm of 234 wind turbines, each 140 metres high, being built on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis. To some, like the writer Ian Jack, arguing in support of the planning application, Lewis was simply ‘a vast, dead place’; but to the majority of others concerned, it was a landscape full of life and particularity. How to express this? The answer lay in part in language, in the scores of ‘precognitions’ – statements of evidence – submitted by islanders, which included love-songs, poems, ballads and personal stories. As Finlay Macleod, a Hebridean friend of Rob’s active in the campaign concluded: ‘‘What is needed is a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ – a lexicon to banish the vision of Lewis as a ‘vast, dead place’. Happily, incredibly, the campaigners eventually won their battle – a victory for both place and place-language which may of course be only temporary.”

In some sense, Landmarks is a step towards just such a phrasebook, rich in language which sings, touches and affects, ‘offering glimpses through other eyes, permitting imaginative contact with distant ways of being, and habits of perception that might be valuable to save and to share’.”

Landmarks will be published in March 2015 by Hamish Hamilton. Image credit, Stanley Donwood.

^ Makes me think of Richard Skelton's work, that.

Do you ever have the sense that you're being marketed to so strongly that you just want to cross your arms across your chest, narrow your chest, and say "hmmmmm"?

Like, Robert Macfarlane mixes nature writing, linguistics and obscure, legacy hyper-local languages?

I'm feeling v v marketed to right now.

I think you'll find we're "bang on trend".