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  • Published: 20 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241966600
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 56
Categories:

Silt



In Silt, bestselling travel writer Robert Macfarlane walks the Broomway, the deadliest path in Britain

In Silt, bestselling travel writer Robert Macfarlane walks the Broomway, the deadliest path in Britain. In one of the most striking chapters of his brilliant recent book The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane walks the Essex offshore path which has claimed the lives of more than sixty people over the centuries. His companion on this atmospheric and potentially perilous journey is his old friend and photographer, David Quentin.

Now, in this special e-book edition, the Broomway section of The Old Ways appears alongside a run of twenty-two photographs taken that day by David, which form a haunting counterpoint to the text itself. In a newly written afterword, David reflects on the walk, on Robert Macfarlane's writing and on the fascinating legal terrain which paths like this one traverse even as they cross the land itself.

  • Published: 20 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241966600
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 56
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.

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