'Luminous, possessing a seemingly paradoxical combination of the dream-like and the hyper-vigilant, The Old Ways is, as with all of Macfarlane's work, a magnificent read.Each sentence can carry astonishing discovery' Rick Bass, US novelist and nature writer With its global reach and mysterious Sebaldian structure, this is MacFarlane's most important book yet' David Rothenberg, author of Survival of the Beautiful and Thousand Mile Song 'Every Robert MacFarlane book offers beautiful writing, bold journeys. In a moving achievement, he returns our heritage to us' Colin Thubron 'Macfarlane immerses himself in regions we may have thought familiar, resurrecting them newly potent and sometimes beautifully strange. I always feel exhilarated after reading Macfarlane' Penelope Lively 'A marvellous marriage of scholarship, imagination and evocation of place. He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley The old ways lead us unexpectedly to the new, and the voyage out is always a voyage inwards. He discovers that paths offer not just means of traversing space, but also of feeling, knowing and thinking. Along the way he walks stride for stride with a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, follows the 'deadliest path in Britain', sails an open boat out into the Atlantic at night, and crosses paths with walkers of many kinds - wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers and devouts. His tracks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird-islands of the Scottish northwest, and from the disputed territories of Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas.

Told in Macfarlane's distinctive and celebrated voice, the book folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. Above all this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers. In The Old Ways Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize 2012 The Old Ways is the stunning fourth book by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane.

The old ways a journey on foot