Robert Macfarlane Books

Each piece in *The Lost Words* is shaped as an acrostic, where the first letters of each line spell out the name of the lost creature or plant. This structure serves more than playful artifice—it’s a ritual. By spelling the name, we perform recognition; by reading the poem aloud, we perform restorat...

From The Lost Words: A Spell Book

The acorn spell opens with promise. An acorn is a small thing, easy to overlook, yet within it lies an oak’s entire universe—roots, trunk, crown, and centuries of endurance. When children lose this word, they lose more than a seed; they lose a link to patience, to cycles of growth, to the idea that ...

From The Lost Words: A Spell Book

My journey began upon the Icknield Way — that pale, ancient track running across the eastern spine of England. It is among the oldest roads in the country, older even than the English language itself. To walk there is to move within deep time: through a corridor carved by Neolithic feet, Roman wheel...

From The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot

The sea has its own paths — invisible to land-dwellers but as ancient and precise as any chalk track. Among the sailors and islanders of Britain’s western shores, I learned that navigation is a form of storytelling. The Hebridean seaways, for instance, retain memory through song, tide, and the textu...

From The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot

I began my search among the highlands, believing that elevation might grant me access to something primal — a clarity of air and perception. Climbing Snowdonia and the Cairngorms, I encountered the history written in stone and lichen, in Gaelic names and mountaineering lore. The mountains had served...

From The Wild Places

From peaks I went outward to islands — those small fragments at the edge of the known. Each island seemed its own world, shaped by isolation yet abundant in resilience. I travelled to places like Ynys Enlli and Rona, and there encountered a different rhythm of existence. Islands invite slowness, for...

From The Wild Places