Robert Macfarlane Reading Order: Where to Start
Robert Macfarlane's books are not a series, but they were written as a loose sequence and they build: the early ones look up at mountains, the middle ones walk outward across Britain, and the late ones go down into caves, ice and rivers. Start with the book that is easiest to love rather than the one that came first, then read the landscape trilogy properly in order. The word books and the collaborations are a separate strand — shorter, more designed, often illustrated — and they are best kept for after the main sequence.
Start Here
BeginnerMeet Macfarlane's prose and his method of walking a landscape until it yields a history.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 2-3 weeks for 340 pages, and this is genuinely relaxing reading - the gentlest entry point of any author path in this style. The chapters are short, each built around one journey to one place, so a chapter an evening works perfectly and there is no plot to lose. Read it with a map of Britain and Ire
- Macfarlane's basic move: walk to a place, sleep there, and let the history, the language and the geology surface out of the walking
- The book sets out to find genuine wildness in an overdeveloped Britain and quietly changes its own definition of wild as it goes - that revision is the book's real plot
- Wildness relocates from remote mountaintops to holloways, hedgerows and edges, which is the finding that made the book influential
- Roger Deakin as companion and presence; the friendships in Macfarlane's books are load-bearing rather than decorative
- Each chapter is anchored to a named landform - island, valley, moor, holloway - and the structure is a taxonomy as much as an itinerary
- Prose that is deliberately worked and heightened; if the style irritates you, that will be obvious within thirty pages and it does not change later
- The nature writing tradition he is joining and arguing with is present from the start, and Landmarks two stages later makes it explicit
- What does Macfarlane mean by wild at the start of the book, and what does he mean by it at the end?
- Which chapter's landform surprised you most as a candidate for wildness, and why?
- What does sleeping outdoors do for the writing that a day walk would not?
- How does Roger Deakin function in the book - as a character, a foil, or a source of authority?
- Is the heightened prose earning its keep, or decorating? Pick one paragraph and argue it either way.
- Find each chapter's location on a map before reading it. The geography is specific and the book is much richer when you know where you are.
- Write down his working definition of wild after chapter two and again after the last chapter. The gap between them is the whole book compressed.
- Walk to somewhere within an hour of where you live that you would not have called wild, and spend twenty minutes there. The book's central claim is testable and cheap to test.
- Keep a list of the terrain words he uses that you did not know. You will want that list when you reach Landmarks.
Next up: With his voice and his method familiar, the more academic first book becomes readable as the origin of everything you have just enjoyed.
A search for genuine wildness in an overdeveloped Britain, which quietly changes its own definition of wild as it goes. The best entry point: short chapters, an obvious structure, and the friendliest version of his voice.
The Landscape Trilogy
BeginnerRead the loose trilogy in order, and see the subject widen from mountains to the whole walked surface of a country.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 5-6 weeks for about 750 pages (Mountains of the Mind 306, The Old Ways 440). Mountains of the Mind is the most academic of the three and reads slowest; it braids cultural history with his own climbing and the historical sections need more attention than anything in The Wild Places. The Old Ways is l
- Mountains of the Mind argues that mountains became desirable rather than fearful through a change in the European imagination, not a change in the mountains
- The sublime, the Romantic revaluation of altitude, and Victorian mountaineering as a cultural rather than athletic phenomenon
- Macfarlane's own climbing runs underneath the history, and the risk he describes is not treated as heroic
- The Old Ways follows ancient paths, sea roads and drove tracks, extending the method from a single place to a network
- Paths as archives: the argument that a route holds the memory of everyone who walked it, which is the trilogy's most contestable claim
- The dead and the absent become as important as the terrain in The Old Ways, particularly Edward Thomas, who effectively haunts the book
- Across the three books the subject widens from mountains, to wild places, to the whole walked surface of a country
- What changed in European culture to make mountains desirable, and what evidence does Macfarlane use for a change in feeling?
- How does he handle the fact that mountaineering kills people? Is the book an apologia or a diagnosis?
- What does the claim that a path holds memory actually assert, and can it be defended without mysticism?
- Why is Edward Thomas the presiding figure of The Old Ways, and what does Macfarlane want from him?
- Reading the three books together, what does the widening subject cost him in depth?
- Read one of the Romantic accounts of the Alps that Mountains of the Mind quotes, in full. His argument is about a change in tone and the tone is only audible in the original.
- Note where Mountains of the Mind switches between history and memoir. The alternation is regular and once you see the pattern the book reads much more easily.
- Follow one route from The Old Ways on a map, start to finish. The book is a set of journeys and tracing one makes the whole structure legible.
- Compare a description of walking in The Old Ways with one in The Wild Places. Five years apart, the prose has changed, and naming the change is the best preparation for the word books.
Next up: The Old Ways ends with Macfarlane increasingly interested in the words for terrain rather than the terrain itself, which is exactly where the next stage begins.
His first book, on how mountains went from being feared to being desired — cultural history braided with his own climbing. More academic than The Wild Places, which is why it reads better second.
Walking ancient paths, sea roads and drove tracks, and the book where the friendships and ghosts start to matter as much as the terrain. It closes the trilogy and is the most companionable of the three.
The Word Books
IntermediateFollow his turn toward language itself — the vocabulary a landscape loses when nobody works it any more.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 3-4 weeks for about 780 pages, but the page count is misleading. Landmarks is 417 pages and alternates essays with glossaries of terrain words; read the essays continuously and the glossaries in small doses, because they are lists and reading a list at prose speed is joyless. The Lost Words is 121 p
- Landmarks argues that a landscape loses its vocabulary when nobody works it any more, and that the vocabulary loss is a perceptual loss
- The glossaries collect regional terrain words from across Britain and Ireland, and their sheer specificity is the argument
- Each Landmarks essay pairs a nature writer with a landscape, which makes the book a portrait of the tradition Macfarlane belongs to
- The Lost Words responds to nature words being dropped from a children's dictionary, and the response is acrostic spell-poems rather than an argument
- Jackie Morris's paintings are co-equal with the text; these are collaborations, not illustrated books
- Reading spell-poems aloud is not optional - they are built on sound and incantation and go flat when read silently
- The Lost Spells is a smaller, pocket-sized companion with a wider range of creatures, and works as a coda rather than a sequel
- This stage is the hinge of the whole career: the walking books end here and the deep books begin from the language question
- What is the actual claim in Landmarks - that losing a word changes perception, or only that it signals a change already made?
- Which of the nature writers profiled in Landmarks do you most want to read, and what did Macfarlane's essay do to make that happen?
- Why acrostics? What does the form contribute that a straight poem would not?
- How do Jackie Morris's paintings change the meaning of the poems they sit with?
- Is The Lost Words a children's book? Does the question matter to how it works?
- Pick ten words from the Landmarks glossaries for landscapes near where you live and use one of them out loud this week. The book's claim is about use, and testing it takes a day.
- Read every Lost Words spell-poem aloud. They were made for the mouth and reading them silently is close to not reading them.
- Compare a glossary page from Landmarks with the corresponding creature in The Lost Words. The two books are the same project in two registers.
- Write your own acrostic for a plant or animal you can see from where you are sitting. It is harder than it looks and it teaches you what Macfarlane was doing with the form.
Next up: Having argued that what we can name shapes what we can see, Macfarlane goes looking for the things we have no vocabulary for at all - and they turn out to be underground.
Glossaries of vanishing terrain words alternating with essays on nature writers. It is the hinge between the walking books and everything after, and explains the project the illustrated books carry out.
Acrostic spell-poems for common nature words dropped from a children's dictionary, with Jackie Morris's paintings. Read it after Landmarks, which supplies the argument it enacts.
The smaller, pocket-sized companion, with a wider range of creatures. Straightforwardly more of the same, and best taken as a coda to The Lost Words.
The Deep Books
IntermediateRead the ambitious late work, where the scale shifts from a walk to geological time and the writing gets darker.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 6-7 weeks for about 880 pages (Underland 496, Is a River Alive? 384). Underland is his most ambitious and most demanding book and should be read slowly, roughly a chapter a sitting; some chapters - the Paris catacombs, the Slovenian caves, the nuclear waste repository - are genuinely claustrophobic
- Underland inverts a career of ascents into a descent: catacombs, dark-matter laboratories, glacial moulins and nuclear waste stores
- Deep time as the book's organising scale, and the moral problem of leaving warnings for people 100,000 years away
- Three things we bury - what we treasure, what we yield, what we wish to dispose of - is the frame that holds an otherwise sprawling book together
- The Anthropocene enters here as a subject rather than a background, and Macfarlane's writing gets noticeably darker
- Is a River Alive? asks whether a waterway can hold legal rights, and takes the question seriously as law rather than as metaphor
- The rights-of-nature movement and actual court cases give the later book a harder edge than anything earlier in the path
- Both books take Underland's deep-time framing and turn it toward obligation, which is where the whole career has been heading
- What are the three reasons Macfarlane says we put things underground, and does the frame hold across all the chapters?
- How does the nuclear waste material change the register of the book, and what is the warning problem he describes?
- What does descent let him say that ascent could not?
- What would it mean legally for a river to be alive? State the strongest version of the case and the strongest objection.
- Has Macfarlane become an activist by the end of this stage, and does that change how you read the earlier books?
- Read the nuclear repository chapter of Underland and then write the warning message you would leave. It is the exercise the chapter is implicitly setting.
- Look up the Whanganui or the Ganges rights rulings before or during Is a River Alive?. The book is discussing real law and the primary material sharpens it.
- Track how often Macfarlane is frightened in Underland. He is not performing courage and the fear is part of the argument about what these spaces are.
- Return to your definition of wild from the first stage. Underland almost certainly breaks it, and rebuilding it is the most useful thing this stage asks of you.
Next up: With the major sequence complete, the short collaborative books can be read for what they are - experiments at the edge of the project rather than entries in it.
Catacombs, dark-matter labs, glacial moulins and nuclear waste stores — the descent counterpart to a career of ascents. His most ambitious book, and the one that most needs the earlier ones behind it.
Three rivers and the legal and moral question of whether a waterway can hold rights. It takes Underland's deep-time framing and turns it into an argument, so it belongs after it.
The Collaborations
BeginnerPick up the short, designed, co-authored books that sit around the main sequence.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: A single week, or even a single afternoon, for about 110 pages total (Holloway 48, Ness 60). These are short, designed, co-authored objects rather than books to work through. Read Holloway in one sitting and Ness aloud in another. Both depend heavily on Stanley Donwood's artwork and on their physica
- Holloway is a slender book about sunken Dorset lanes, made with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards, and reads as a footnote to The Old Ways
- It is also an elegy - the return journey is made after Roger Deakin's death, which is why it carries more weight than its length suggests
- Ness is an incantatory prose-poem about Orford Ness, a former weapons testing site, and is nothing like the walking books
- Ness rewards being read aloud and does not reward being read for sense on a first pass
- Both are collaborations in which the images are not illustrations of the text but a parallel argument
- These are minor-key pieces by design, and reading them as minor is what makes them enjoyable
- Attempting either of these first would give a badly misleading picture of what Macfarlane does, which is why they close the path
- What does Holloway gain from being so short, and what would be lost by expanding it into an essay?
- How does the presence of a dead friend change the second journey in Holloway?
- What is Ness actually about, and is a plain answer possible or is the refusal of one the point?
- How do Donwood's images argue rather than illustrate?
- Having finished the whole path, which Macfarlane book would you now hand to someone who had read none of them?
- Read Ness aloud, in one go, without stopping to work anything out. It is closer to liturgy than to prose and it only functions at speaking pace.
- Look up Orford Ness and what was tested there before reading Ness. The book assumes the history and withholds it.
- Reread the holloway chapter of The Wild Places immediately after Holloway. The two texts are the same place ten years and one death apart.
- Write your own reading order for Macfarlane in four lines. Anyone who has read all eleven of these has a defensible one, and writing it down is the cleanest way to find out what you actually think the project is.
Next up: The path closes here, and the obvious continuation is the nature writers Landmarks profiles - the tradition Macfarlane spends his career reading, arguing with and extending.
A slender book about sunken lanes in Dorset, made with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards. A minor key piece that reads as a footnote to The Old Ways.
A strange, incantatory prose-poem about Orford Ness, again with Donwood. Nothing like the walking books, and worth trying only once you trust him enough to follow him somewhere odd.
Discussion
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