Landmarks

About this book

Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather.

Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

Contents

1. The Word-Hoard   1
2. A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook   15
      Glossary I: Flatlands   37
3. The Living Mountain   55
      Glossary II: Uplands   81
4. The Woods and the Water   95
      Glossary III: Waterlands   117
5. Hunting Life   139
      Glossary IV: Coastlands   163
6. The Tunnel of Swords and Axes   177
      Glossary V: Underlands   195
7. North-Minded   209
      Glossary VI: Northlands   221
8. Bastard Countryside   231
      Glossary VII: Edgelands   249
9. Stone-Books   263
      Glossary VIII: Earthlands   279
10. The Black Locust and the Silver Pine   289
      Glossary IX: Woodlands   305
11. Childish   315
      Glossary X: Left blank for future place-words and the reader's own terms   329

Postscript   333
Guide to the Glossaries   337
Notes   345
Select Bibliography   369
Acknowledgements   375
Index   379

Customer Reviews

Biography

Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), which won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, The Wild Places (2007), which won the Boardman-Tasker Award and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.