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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.
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
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.
