> Skip to content
  • Published: 5 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241967867
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Landmarks




A joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two, from the bestselling author of The Old Ways

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

  • Published: 5 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241967867
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the authors

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and The Lost Words, co-created with Jackie Morris. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. The Lost Words won the Books Are My Bag Beautiful Book Award and the Hay Festival Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.

Grahame Sydney

Grahame Sydney is one of NZ's major artists, best known for his glorious landscapes of Central Otago. Working in oils, watercolours, egg tempera, etchings and lithographs, his paintings have been widely exhibited and are held in private and public collections worldwide. Sydney is also a talented, highly regarded photographer. In 2003, he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting.

Praise for Landmarks

A story like this is salutary...Landmarks is a book that ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationists the world over.

Guardian

Enormously pleasurable, deeply moving . . . Landmarks is both a bid to save our rich hoard of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep creative relationship to place

Financial Times

His writing has a confidence and enjoyment, a passionate purpose . . . he celebrates our vast, but evaporating, vocabulary for the landscape

Daily Telegraph

Publisher's description. The number one bestselling book from the author of The Old Ways. This is a celebration of the special relationship between language and place, a field guide to nature writers from Roger Deakin to Nan Shepherd, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable, poetic, funny, peculiar and endangered words to describe the natural world.

Penguin

The mood is one of celebration... [Landmarks is] the product of an active academic intelligence and emotional generosity, irradiated by a profound sense of wonder... Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly

Independent

The writing is full of clarity and internal reflections and the chapters ripple over into each other like a linked chain of mountain pools.... What is remarkable about these words is how precise they are, and how deeply local. They feel as if they somehow grew out of the land itself. A delight.

Sunday Times Magazine

Thoughtful and lyrical writing . . . It's gorgeous

Katy Guest, Independent on Sunday