He grapples objectively with facts, identifying gneiss or granite, chalk or peat and he is a respectful user of cartography, archaeology and natural history. Shallow channels, formed by the passage of water and carbonic acid, lead to hairline cracks, runnels, and eventually to the formation of an escarpment edge, around which humans and animals create their own ways. In limestone regions, these begin with rainfall. Some are shaped by the need to connect place with place, others by habits of the terrain, including what geologists call "preferential pathways". Our landscape is still webbed by walkways. Hence those small sickles, or "hooks", which used to hang on posts at the start of well-used paths in 19th-century Suffolk, so that a walker could lop impeding growth and leave the hook at the other end for a walker coming in the opposite direction. These are ancient routes, paths and tracks, still discoverable, and kept in place by use. They focus on tarmac and ignore not only "wild places", the subject of Robert Macfarlane's previous book, but also "the old ways". Road maps make transparent the route a car driver needs to take, but they desecrate landscape.
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