The Wild Places
By Robert Macfarlane
Granta £18.99, 352 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

Suddenly everyone is wild about the wild. Books such as Jay Griffiths’ Wild and Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees explore natural and cultural phenomena uncontaminated by consumer society. The popular TV series Coast and Mountain focus on the fringes, margins and rocky peaks of an overpopulated island. Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places starts as an essay in this genre: an attempt to find the remaining pockets of wilderness in the British Isles, beginning in the far north and west.

Macfarlane is aware that it may be a quixotic quest. Writers such as John Fowles and the American William Least-Heat Moon have argued that no truly wild places remain in the UK. Bill McKibben in The End of Nature went still further and concluded that there could be no true wilderness on a thoroughly polluted planet. Macfarlane, a highly intelligent writer, is also aware of ironies: a Cambridge academic, he lives in one of the least wild places in Britain, surrounded by drained fens as intensively farmed as any land in Europe. It also sounds as if he leads a life of exemplary domestic order and sober industry – not wild in the least.

The Wild Places is structured, beautifully and effectively, as a series of journeys, each of which illuminates a certain facet of wildness. The early expeditions feature obviously wild places: a small island called Ynys Enlli off the Lleyn peninsula in north Wales, where Macfarlane swims amid phosphorescence and sleeps surrounded by shearwaters, the Cuillin-rimmed Coruisk basin on Skye (Britain’s most Gothic landscape), the huge barren expanse of Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands. These are localities almost without human presence: uninhabited and scarcely marked by civilisation.

But even in such places Macfarlane cannot help but find hauntings of humanity. On Ynys Enlli he realises he is following in the footsteps or coracle-traces of the monks called peregrini who colonised some of the most remote places in Europe, including the still more inaccessible islet of Skellig Michael off Kerry.

A freezing night on the bare mountain of Ben Hope, in the far north of Scotland, acts as a watershed. Macfarlane was the writer who celebrated the imaginative hold of earth’s high places in his much-praised first book, Mountains of the Mind. In Scotland, he expects an epiphany of wildness, instead he experiences a frightening alienation. This is the ne plus ultra of wildness, a place which offers nothing in the way of accommodation to the human, and, more surprisingly, little in the way of imaginative handhold.

From this extreme point, Macfarlane’s wild places become less granitic and more permeable. The human presence is also more acknowledged. His subsequent journeys, to the west of Ireland, to the coasts of Dorset, Essex and Suffolk, are more companionable, in various senses. He is accompanied on three of them by his friend and fellow writer the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog and the posthumously published Wildwood. In fact Deakin, whose final illness is movingly described, haunts the whole book, as a kind of tutelary elder, a man with an affinity for wildness and an ability to find or even create it wherever he looked. One of the best chapters, called “Holloway”, is devoted to the strange sunken lanes between hedges which constitute a hidden map of wildness in the apparently tame southern counties of England. Macfarlane and Deakin explore them together, crawling like weasels or badgers.

Another kind of company is that of previous generations. In the Burren in County Clare, Macfarlane is attracted not just to the strange limestone landscape but to the grim past of the great Irish famine. The dead haunt these places as much as the living. Elsewhere, Macfarlane is accompanied on his travel by predecessors in peregrination: writers such as Edward Thomas, the remarkable Vaughn Cornish, who lived out an obsession with waves, and J.A. Baker, author of the visionary birder’s book, The Peregrine.

Macfarlane’s message is, in the end, oddly reassuring. Wildness in Britain may have been driven to the margins and desperately depleted, but it has a remarkable resilience. In fact, wildness and culture cannot ultimately be segregated; they live in an inextricable weave of interrelationship. What makes this book so remarkable is not so much that message as the extraordinary beauty and precision of the writer’s descriptive prose. Time and again he takes the reader’s breath away with the exactitude of a phrase or image. Let this suffice as an example: “the seal’s holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare’s run, the hawk’s high gyres: such things are wild.”