WHAT FIRST DREW YOU TO THE UK’S WILD REGIONS?
Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewells. Perhaps not the answer
you’d expected; I should explain. My childhood
holidays were invariably spent in mountainous regions
— Connemara, the Lakes, Snowdonia and above all the
Scottish Highlands. My parents had to lure my brother
and me into the hills, and they did so with cakes and
sweets, ruthlessly. My summer birthday cake would often
be a cherry bakewell with a single candle in it, on a windy
mountaintop. Strange are the things that set us going.HAS WRITING ABOUT LANDSCAPES HELPED YOU
UNDERSTAND THEM MORE?
Literature and landscape are the intertwining braids
of my life, certainly. I read my way up mountains
before I walked up them, and I walked up them
before I wrote about them. Now I find that place
deepens page, and vice versa. Nan Shepherd, author
of The Living Mountain, taught me to see the
Cairngorms completely differently, and indeed
to approach mountains differently. Nan preferred
passes to peaks, an ethos of pilgrimage to one of
conquest, and she spoke of walking ‘into’ the
mountains, rather than only up them. J A Baker’s
incandescent masterpiece The Peregrine sprang
the much-maligned landscape of coastal Essex into
astonishment for me, and ignited a fascination with
peregrines that’s tracked me back to my own city of
Cambridge, where a pair now breeds on the gothic
stonework above the main street.WHERE HAVE YOU FELT MOST HUMBLED BY NATURE?
Certainly in Arctic Norway, alone on the windward and
seaward side of the Lofoten archipelago in winter, when
I crossed the central ridge of that island range to reach
a vast sea cave in which, thousands of years previously,
iron oxide had been used to paint dancing red figures
on the cave wall. A northerly blizzard blew in, trapping
me in the bay without mobile signal for some days. I was
both frightened and awed by what I discovered there,
and what happened to my experience of time on that
wild frontier.WHAT TYPE OF TERRAIN MOST INSPIRES YOU?
I live in Cambridge, a landscape so flat you can fax
it, as the old joke goes. The landscapes that inspire
me most are still mountainous ones, though. When
I’m in the mountains, I find myself whooping and
cheering involuntarily, whistling, singing, hugging my
friends spontaneously. “There are places where the
natural movement of the heart is upwards,” wrote the
mountaineer-mystic W H Murray. We all know a version
of that feeling, those places, and for me it’s in the high
mountains, especially in winter.HAVE YOUR RECENT EXPLORATIONS OF THE SUBTERRANEAN
WORLD SHIFTED YOUR FOCUS, OR ARE YOU STILL A SUMMIT-
SEEKER AT HEART?
The darkness of the world’s interior holds greater
mysteries than the sunlight of the world’s summits.
We know so little of what lies beneath us; it’s the space
into which we’ve long placed that which we love most
(the bodies of our revered dead, precious goods) and
that which we fear most (nuclear waste, secrets, the
murdered). So, I’m both more fascinated and more
appalled by the underworld than by the peaks, if that
makes sense.IN OUR UNCERTAIN TIMES, WHAT PLACES ARE YOU
DERIVING COMFORT FROM?
A small beechwood on the outskirts of Cambridge,
reachable along a field path perhaps 50 years old,
which leads past hedgerows foaming with blackthorn
and hawthorn blossom. It’s a modest place, planted
by the community, and giving shelter and succour to
hundreds of thousands of people over the decades.
Right now, the green-gold light falling through the
young beech leaves, the wrens whirring between
bushes; these remind me of patterns of being and
circuits of life that exceed our own suddenly
crumbling systems and structures.Robert Macfarlane is the prize-winning author
of Landmarks, The Lost Words, The Old Ways, and
Underland, all published by Penguin BooksSECOND NATURE
ROBERT MACFARLANE
“ Literature and
landscape are the
intertwining braids
of my life.”
IMAGES: AWL IMAGES; ALEX TURNER
UNITED KINGDOMJul/Aug 2020 65THE POWER OF PLACE