[]
Landmarks
  • Published: 5 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241972731
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

Landmarks

Formats & editions
Paperback
18 July 2016
EBook
5 Mar 2015
Audiobook
5 Mar 2015
Buy from…
Apple Books Audible Google Play Kobo Libro.fm Spotify

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

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Landmarks, a fascinating exploration of the relationship between language and landscapes by Robert Macfarlane, read by Roy McMillan.

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.

The audiobook version contains an exclusive bonus chapter - a recording of Finlay MacLeod (a novelist, historian, broadcaster, archivist and one of the dedicatees of Landmarks) reading words and definitions from his Peat Glossary for the Isle of Lewis. This hoard of rare and evocative terms was one of the inspiring documents for the book.

Finlay's voice is also used as a divider between chapters; and the other glossaries in the text are themselves bracketed with appropriate sound effects.
  • Published: 5 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241972731
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

About the author

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.

Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.

RM

Also by Robert Macfarlane

Is a River Alive?
Underland
Go Wild
The Lost Sounds
The Wild Cards
The Lost Spells
Ness
See all

Praise for Landmarks

A magnificent meditation on walking and writing. An astonishingly haunted book

Adam Nicolson (on The Old Ways), Daily Telegraph

The Old Ways sets the imagination tingling . . . it is like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems

John Carey (on The Old Ways), Sunday Times

A wonderful book - literally a book full of wonders. He has a poet's eye and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy

John Banville (on The Old Ways), The Observer